There are no amateurs in the world of children.

How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?

I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

To plot is to live. […] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral, Jack. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation holds its breath. - (WN 292)

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.