An ocean without unnamed monsters would be like sleep without dreams.

I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.

It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.

Says he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good, 'cause his little piece of a soul wasn't no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole.

We think of strangers as stronger and better than we are.

It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man.

Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try.