The game of life is good, though all of life may be hurt, and though all lives lose the game in the end.

I was five years old the first time I got drunk.

The ghostly winter silence had given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life.

Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?

But under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of space.

Life, in a sense, is living and surviving. And all that makes for living and surviving is good. He who follows the fact cannot go astray, while he who has no reverence for the fact wanders afar.

It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild. (Ch.1)