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

He saw something that makes a man doubtful of the constancy of the realities outside himself. It was the shocking discovery that makes a man wonder if I've missed this, what else have I failed to see?

He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories. -Hazel, Cannery Row

Misfortune is a fact of nature acceptable to women, especially when it falls on other women.

A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights.

it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials.

What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.