the reason God made February short a few days was because he knew that by the time people came to the end of it they would die if they had to stand one more blasted day.

On Decoration Day, while everyone else in town was at the cemetery decorating the graves of our Glorious War Dead, Willie Beaner and me, Robert Burns Hewitt, took Mabel Cramm's bloomers and run them up the flagpole in front of the town hall. That was the beginning of all my troubles.

One thing living in Japan did for me was to make me feel that what is left out of a work of art is as important as, if not more important than, what is put in.

The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.

Nothing smelled so good or danced so well as a birch fire.

She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there--like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.

Impressed. Lord. He had nearly drowned.