I sat staring up at a shelf in my workroom from which thirty-one books identically dressed in neat dark green leather stared back at me with a sort of cold hostility like children who resent their parents. Don't stare at us like that! they said. Don't blame us if we didn't turn out to be the perfection you expected. We didn't ask to be brought into the world.

Men often marry their mothers.

There are people who have a penchant for cities-more than that, a talent for them, a gift of sensing them, of feeling their rhythm and pulsebeats, as others have a highly developed music sense, or color reaction. It is a thing that cannot be acquired.

Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.

A stricken tree, a living thing, so beautiful, so dignified, so admirable in its potential longevity, is, next to man, perhaps the most touching of wounded objects.

No woman ought to pretend she's intelligent. And if she is she ought to have the intelligence to pretend she isn't.

Does one eat peanuts at a ball game?' 'It ain't hardly legal if you don't.