You have to go, but I have to stay.

What a bummer it is to be a human being.

There is no good reason good can't triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia.

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

I think, therefore I am, therefore I am photographable.

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for--to find out how much a man could take without breaking.