The first grave. Now we're getting someplace. Houses and children and graves, that's home, Tom. Those are the things that hold a man down.

It occurs to me that just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans being in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.

A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes reality along with other realities—never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.

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

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.