I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught – in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too – in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence.
By this time the Indian fighting had become like dangerous cattle drives – the tribes were forced into revolt, driven and decimated, and the sad, sullen remnants settled on starvation lands. It was not nice work but, given the pattern of the country’s development, it had to be done.
We know that – all that. It’s not us, it’s the bank. A bank isn’t like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn’t like a man either. That’s the monster.
Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine.
Any writing which has influenced the thinking and the lives of innumerable people is important.
There is one thing I don’t think any one has ever set down although it is true – to a monster, everyone else is a monster.
It is true that we are weak and sick and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would, millenniums ago, have disappeared from the face of the earth. A few remnants of fossilized jawbone, some broken teeth in strata of limestone, would be the only mark man would have left of his existence in the world.
He don’t talk like other people. He’s an Irishman. And he’s all full of plans – a hundred plans a day. And he’s all full of hope.
I believe that there is only one story in the world... Humans are caught in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hunger and ambitions in their avarice and cruelty and in their kindness and generosity too – in a net of good and evil. A man after he has brushed off the dust and chips of life, will have left only the hard clean questions: was it good or was it evil? Have I done well or ill?
We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours. That’s what makes it ours – being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.
It’s a free country. Well, try to get some freedom to do. Fella says you’re jus’ as free as you got jack to pay for it.
When two men live together they usually maintain a kind of shabby neatness out of incipient rage at each other. Two men alone are constantly on the verge of fighting, and they know it.
Wisht I knowed what all the sins was, so I could do ’em.
Then the soldiers went to Mexico and it was a kind of painful picnic. Nobody knows why you go to a picnic to be uncomfortable when it is so easy and pleasant to eat at home.
Puedes saber esto: teme el momento en que el hombre deje de sufrir y morir por un concepto, porque esta cualidad es el hombre mismo, y lo que le diferencia en el conjunto del universo.
It was his first sharp experience with the rule that without money you cannot fight money.
Most lives extend in a curve. There is a rise of ambition, a rounded peak of maturity, a gentle downward slope of disillusion and last a flattened grade of waiting for death.
Di sera avveniva una cosa strana: le venti famiglie diventavano una famiglia, i figli diventavano figli di tutti. La privazione della casa diventava una privazione comune, e gli anni felici nell’Ovest erano un sogno comune.
If it troubles us it must be that we find the trouble in ourselves.
There was a wall against learning. A man wanted his children to read, to figure, and that was enough. More might make them dissatisfied and flighty.