He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things: a one-track mind near the track's end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive . . .

A mother never realizes that her children are no longer children.

This continent, an open palm spread frank before the sky.

All of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is

Children, taught either years beneath their intelligence or miles wide of relevance to it, or both: their intelligence becomes hopelessly bewildered, drawn off its centers, bored, or atrophied.

I suspect the fault...is in me: that I hate any job on earth, as a job and a hindrance and a semi-suicide.

You've got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice. You've got to keep your mind off pitying your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of a howl about it. You've got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they've come through it and that you will too.