Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles.

But you can't always tell - with somebody's mother, I mean. Mothers are all slightly insane.

It's not too bad when the sun's out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.

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.

There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady.

But if we come back, if German men come back, if British men come back, and Japs, and French, and all the other men, all of us talking, writing, painting, making movies of heroes, and cockroaches and foxholes and blood, then future generations will always be doomed to future Hitlers. It's never occurred to boys to have contempt for wars, to point to soldiers' pictures in history books, laughing at them. If German boys had learned to be contemptuous of violence, Hitler would have had to take up knitting to keep his ego warm.

He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor.