When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book — to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.

The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.

The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant

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.

And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "Use it well, use it wisely.

Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion.

Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.