Courage is grace under pressure.

It's a town you come to for a short time.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?

I do not know what I thought Paris would be like, but it was not that way. It rained nearly every day.

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.