In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.

Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared.[...]It's slow. It rots out your guts.

If a man ordered a beer milk shake, he thought, he'd better do it in a town where he wasn't known.

Failure is a state of mind. It's like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it.

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

A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.

Only mediocrity escapes criticism.