“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cann...”

“Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.”

“That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most a...”

“This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That can happen when people die--the argument with them drops away and peopl...”

“a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled b...”

“The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedythat is every man's tragedy.”

“We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies.”

“Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace.”

“You can be used by someone for their aims when you are not aware of your true being”

“It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory”

“Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain...”

“Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.”

“Though it may be interesting to know how many hairs there are on the human head, or how the giant red spot on the surface of Jupiter was formed, the real truths we are interested in are those about...”

“He found solace in what he wrote. It was an attempt to discover who he was at the moment.”

“I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ou...”