There's another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the world around him. If I switch it on my eyes adapt to it and I can see only the small pool of light it makes in front of me; I am isolated. Leaving the flashlight in my pocket where it belongs, I remain a part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary.

I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life -- if I live that long.

The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations.

I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.

Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, _A Piece of My Mind_; _The Cold War and the Income Tax_; the introduction to _Patriotic Gore_.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.

Most of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders.

We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal.