...after all, what is a planet but an island in space?

When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.

There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive—yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another. But it is a necessary part of our mechanism that we should be able to cry only for a time over even an ocean of spilt milk—the spectacular must soon become the commonplace if life is to be supportable.

It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.

If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does.

There was often a great deal of grown-up fuss that seemed disproportionate to causes.

We all have our youthful follies, embarassing to recall -- but people somehow find it hard to dismiss as a youthful folly anything that has happened to be a financial success.