It's a mining town in lotus land.

Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.

The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?

What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours?

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.

I’m not sure what I’ll do, but— well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.