Perhaps the less we have, the more we are required to brag.

Luck, you see, brings bitter friends.

[He] fell right into the oldest conviction in the world-- that the girl you are in love with can't possibly be anything but true and honest.

A question is a trap and an answer is your foot in it.

The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but it is too seldom realized about books of fact. And yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there.... It would be good to know the impulse truly, not to be confused by the 'services to science' platitudes or the other little mazes into which we entice our minds so that they will not know what we are doing.

Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life. While there remains even a plaintive memory, a person cannot be cut off, dead. And he thought, “It’s a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man’s life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward stillness.

Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all else, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word.