We all agree it's too big to keep up with, that we're surrounded by life, that we'll never understand it, so we center it all in by swigging Scotch from the bottle and when it's empty I run out of the car and buy another one, period.

And as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words.

I wished I could explain it to those I loved, my mother, to Japhy, but there just weren't any words to describe the nothingness and purity of it. "Is there a certain and definite teaching to be given to all living creatures?" was the question probably asked to beetle browed snowy Dipankara, and his answer was the roaring silence of the diamond.

Between incomprehensible and incoherent sits the madhouse. I am not in the madhouse.

Life must be rich and full of loving--it's no good otherwise, no good at all, for anyone.

The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation, with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter.

The cowboy music twanged in the roadhouse and carried across the fields, all sadness. It was all right with me. I kissed my baby and we put out the lights.