The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost.
But it isn’t hunger that drives millions of armed American Males to forests and hills every autumn, as the high incidence of heart failure among the hunters will prove. Somehow the hunting process has to do with masculinity, but I don’t quite know how.
He wanted to say something beautiful, I think.
You can boast about anything if it’s all you have.
And he saw the right evening star reflected in her eyes, and he saw the black cloud reflected in her eyes.
There’s more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.
At the roadsides I never had a really good dinner or a really bad breakfast.
Lanser said, “There are no peaceful people, when will you learn it? There are no friendly people, can’t you understand that?
Hazel grew up – did four years in grammar school, four years in reform school, and didn’t learn a thing in either place. Reform schools are supposed to teach viciousness and criminality but Hazel didn’t pay enough attention.
They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens.
Then there were harebells, tiny lanterns, cream white and almost sinful looking, and these were so rare and magical that a child, finding one, felt singled out and special all day long.
Part of the far shore disappeared into a shimmer that looked like water. There was no certainty in seeing, no proof that what you saw was there or was not there. And the people of the Gulf expected all places were that way, and it was not strange to them.
And in my own life I am not willing to trade quality for quantity.
Relationship Time to Aloneness.” Having a companion fixes you in time and that of the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present.
The Word is symbol of delight which sucks up men and scenes, trees, plants, factories, and Pekinese. Then the Thing becomes the Word and the back to Thing again, but warped and woven into a fantastic pattern.
A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he only ought to consider whether he is doing right or wrong.
And, of course, people are only interested in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And I here make a rule- a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting- only the deeply personal and familiar.
And always, if he had a little money, a man could get drunk. The hard edges gone, and the warmth. Then there was no loneliness, for a man could people his brain with friends, and he could find his enemies and destroy them.
I’m tired of people who have not been at war who know all about it.
The wedding was in Monterey, a sombre boding ceremony in a little Protestant chapel. The church had so often seen two ripe bodies die by the process of marriage that it seemed to celebrate a mystic double death with its ritual.