The group, the herd, which is any collection of children.
That mini heart attack you have when you realize you tipped your chair back just a little too far.
Polly cocked his head sideways, inspecting Adam, and scratched the feathers at the base of his beak with a careful foreclaw. “Come off it, you bastard,” said Polly unemotionally. Liza frowned at him. “Polly,” she said sternly, “that’s not polite.” “Bloody bastard!” Polly observed. Liza ignored the vulgarity.
But it must be hard living the Lily Maid, the Goddess-Virgin, and the other all at once. Humans just do smell bad sometimes.
In long-range planning for a trip, I think there is a private conviction that it won’t happen.
Sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.
There’s people that when they see Samuel Hamilton the first time might get the idea he’s full of bull. 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.
For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis.
When Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, only five Americans had previously been so honored. Accepting the prize in Stockholm, he gave an impassioned speech in which he argued that “the ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.
And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.
Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold.
Just Jim Casy now. Ain’t got the call no more. Got a lot of sinful idears – but they seem kinda sensible.
But I do feel strange-almost unearthly. I’ll never get used to being alive. It’s a mystery. Always startled to find I’ve survived.
During the years he was never sick, except of course for the chronic indigestion which was universal, and still is, with men who live alone, cook for themselves, and eat in solitude.
It’s like me, I wouldn’ take the good ol’ gospel that was just layin’ there to my hand. I got to be pickin’ at it until I got it all tore down.
A war comes always to someone else... The war, at first anyway, was for other people... And just as war is always for somebody else, so it is also true that someone else always gets killed. And Mother of God! that wasn’t true either...
Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an’ he foun’ he didn’ have no soul that was his’n. Says he foun’ he jus’ got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain’t no good, ’cause his little piece of a soul wasn’t no good ’less it was with the rest, an’ was whole. Funny how I remember. Didn’ think I was even listenin’. But I know now a fella ain’t no good alone.
At night in this waterless air the stars come down just out of reach of your fingers.
I nearly forgot something my old father told me not long before he died. He said the threshold of insult is in direct relation to intelligence and security.
It is advisable to look from the tide pools to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.