If you want to keep a friend, never test him.
The first grave. Now we’re getting someplace. Houses and children and graves, that’s home, Tom. Those are the things that hold a man down.
He had an idea that even when beaten he could steal a little victory by laughing at defeat.
For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it.
It was deeply a part of Lee’s kindness and understanding that man’s right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary.
If a man ordered a beer milkshake he’d better do it in a town where he wasn’t known.
Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.
I have seen too many men go down, and I never permit myself to forget that one day, through accident or under the charge of a younger, stronger knight, I too will go down.
In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.
Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.
He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories. -Hazel, Cannery Row.
I can still tend the rabbits, George? I didn’t mean no harm, George.
Well, I never seen one guy take so much trouble for another guy. I just like to know what your interest is.
A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes reality along with other realities – never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked.
I know now why confusion in government is not only tolerated but encouraged. I have learned. A confused people can make no clear demands.
The break would never come as long as fear could turn to wrath.
You can’t slice up morals.
The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.
And Tom brought him chicken soup until he wanted to kill him. The lore has not died out of the world, and you will still find people who believe that soup will cure any hurt or illness and is no bad thing to have for the funeral either.
This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.