It all ends in tears anyway.

We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.

Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?

Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye--with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad.

Oftentimes an originator of new language forms is called 'pretentious' by jealous talents. But it ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.

It is possible for the human spirit to win after all.