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

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.

(Suicide) takes some doing, with maybe pain and maybe hell.

I remember as a child reading or hearing the words 'The Great Divide' and being stunned by the glorious sound, a proper sound for the granite backbone of a continent. I saw in my mind escarpments rising into the clouds, a kind of natural Great Wall of China.

The Hebrew word, the word timshel - 'Thou mayest' - that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open...Why, that makes a man great...He can choose his course and fight it through and win...I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'Thou mayest'. ch 24

This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.