Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different.

Sometimes when she was alone, and she knew she was alone, she permitted her mind to play in a garden, and she smiled.

A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory

Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby those fruits may be eaten.

...Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.

This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning—from "I" to "we". If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I", and cuts you off forever from the "we".

He drank too much when he could get it, ate too much when it was there, talked too much all the time.