Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.

I have no choice of living or dying, you see, sir--but I do have a choice of how I do it. If I tell them not to fight, they will be sorry, but they will fight. If I tell them to fight, they will be glad, and I who am not a very brave man will have made them a little braver.

You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk.

I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails.

With all our horrors and faults, somewhere in us there is a shining.

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