I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind.... It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don't know.

Listen," he said. "If you was a fish, Mother Nature'd take care of you, wouldn't she? Right? You don't think them fish just die when it gets to be winter, do ya?" No, but--" You're goddam right they don't

She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.

It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

I have so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin.

You don't know how to talk to people you don't like. Don't love, really. You can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.

He was the tallest, thinnest, weariest boy I had ever seen in my life. He was brilliant. He had gorgeous brown eyes, and he had only two suits. He was completely unhappy, and I didn't know why.