She believed, and was entitled to believe, I must say, that all human beings were evil by nature, whether tormentors or victims, or idle standers-by. They could only create meaningless tragedies, she said, since they weren't nearly intelligent enough to accomplish all the good they were meant to do.

The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.

There is no peace, I'm sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.

They like life alright, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime.

They say, you know, about evolution, it surely happened because their fossil record shows that. Look, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn't possibly have produced such machines.

Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.