Talk is a pure art. Its only limits are the patience of listeners who, when they get tired, can always pay for their coffee or change it with a friendly waiter and walk out.

A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them. Still, you can't listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.

It is a most curious experience for a man of seventy-two to be confronted with the greenhorn enthusiasms of his youth. Young people think they are so smart. Alas the doctrines they spout with such fervor turn out to be mostly parroted from their elders.

The chilly December day! two shivering bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio first felt their homemade contraption whittled out of hickory sticks, gummed together with Arnstein's bicycle cement, stretched with muslin they'd sewn on their sister's sewing machine in their own backyard on Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio, soar into the air above the dunes and the wide beach at Kitty Hawk.

Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.

It's almost worth having been in the army for the joy your freedom gives you

Love is cheap. You can buy it anywhere. Lives are cheap. It's money that's dear. You have to work days and sit up nights thinking how to make money.