One cat just leads to another. The place is so damned big it doesn't really seem as though there were many cats until you see them all moving like a mass migration at feeding time.

Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.

I was always embarresed by the words 'sacred,' 'glorious,' and 'sacrifice' and the expression 'in vain.' We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stock yards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them.

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again, . . . to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on a tent, to know where I can find what I want.