No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.

It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death-emotions that appear to have developed upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence. All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.

I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.

The world knew you before you knew the world.

The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.