A mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment of the sage.

Life is too short for grief. Or regret. Or bullshit.

Places: a cold, bleak, lonely day on the rim at Muley Point, Utah. And the heart-cracking loveliness of the blood-smeared, bitter, incomprehensible slaughterhouse of a world.

Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society.

Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass.

Anywhere, anytime, I'd sacrifice the finest nuance for a laugh, the most elegant trope for a smile.

As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.