The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.

When I was a child in the Navy during World War II, I was perennially grateful to the armed services libraries for having on hand a good supply of those pocket books, which were so common in that period. I must have read a couple hundred of them, and they did a lot to save my sanity.

You don't fight to protect warships or old men. Like the book says, you fight to save your civilization. And so often it seems that civilization is composed mainly of the things women and children want.

We are never prepared for what we expect.

It heartens me to think of Verdi who composed thundering operas in his eighties; Michelangelo who did fine work in his ninetieth year, and Titian, who painted better than ever in his one hundredth.

About a billion years ago, long before the continents had separated to define the ancient oceans, or their own outlines had been determined, a small protuberance jutted out from the northwest corner of what would later become North America.

A group of two dozen nurses completely surrounded by 100,000 unattached American men.