Good news is rare these days, and every glittering ounce of it should be cherished and hoarded and worshipped and fondled like a priceless diamond.

Sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks.

Words are such a poor medium when you really want someone to feel something.

How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection.

I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I felt that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actor, kidding ourselves on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between those two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.

Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why.

I got tired and embarrassed by the constant poverty of those years. I told Doug [ Brinkley] this is really going to be a horrible downer of a book [The Proud Highway] if all it's going to be is about being broke. I didn't like being reminded of desperation at all times.