If you want to keep a friend, never test him.

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of a human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed

We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.

I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion.

There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don't mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that's the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln.

And her joy was nearly like sorrow.

It doesn't matter that Cathy was what I have called a monster. Perhaps we can't understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water?