Being at ease with himself put him at ease with the world.
I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now – only that place where the books are kept.
Only mediocrity escapes criticism.
A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory.
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish.
Some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread their hatred around like butter on hot bread.
You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.
You never oughta drink water when it ain’t runnin’.
A book is like a man – clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly.
I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.
I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen. It’s scary to think about. Point of reference again. When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people.
What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness? You only truly, deeply appreciate and are grateful for something when you compare and contrast it to something worse.
The Mexican War was a training ground for generals, so that when the sad self-murders settled on us, the leaders knew the techniques for making it properly horrible.
It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge intime, toprotest againstchange, particularlychangefor the better.
Some people there are who, being grown; forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child.
And their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels.
A good writer always works at the impossible.
Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
The comfortable people in tight houses felt pity at first, and then distaste, and finally hatred for the migrant people.