Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!

The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.

Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

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 felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Sometimes I wish I'd went through those good times stone cold sober so I could remember everything," he said, "but then again, if I had been sober the times probably wouldn't have been worth remembering.