The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.

... humanity deserved to die horribly, since it had behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

Well, it's an ancestral tribe. These were immigrants from north of Germany who came here about the time of the Civil War, but anyway, these people called themselves free thinkers. They were impressed, incidentally, by Darwin. They're called Humanists now; people who aren't so sure that the Bible is the Word of God.

The little girls were wearing black party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice they were.

Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

The First Amendment reads more like a dream than a law, and no other nation, so far as I know, has been crazy enough to include such a dream among its fundamental legal documents. I defend it because it has been so successful for two centuries in preserving our freedom and increasing our vitality, knowing that all arguments in support of it are certain to sound absurd.