People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

We live in all we seek.

Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.

I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one

When I was quite young I fondly imagined that all foreign languages were codes for English. I thought that "hat," say, was the real and actual name of the thing, but that people in other countries, who obstinately persisted in speaking the code of their forefathers, might use the word "ibu," say, to designate not merely the concept hat, but the English word "hat." I knew only one foreign word, "oui," and since it had three letters as did the word for which it was a code, it seemed, touchingly enough, to confirm my theory.

These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.