It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.

He had said, "I am a man," and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god. It meant that Kino would drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea. Juana, in her woman's soul, knew that the mountain would stand while the man broke himself; that the sea would surge while the man drowned in it. And yet it was this thing that made him a man, half insane and half god, and Juana had need of a man; she could not live without a man.

Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is--and a woman too, I guess.

Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes it'll on'y be one.

It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.