A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.

The tradition I was born into was essentially nomadic, a herdsmen tradition, following animals across the earth. The bookshops are a form of ranching; instead of herding cattle, I herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.

The only bookstore I had was the paperback rack at the drugstore.

True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his girlfriends' boyfriend - and he accepts it

Call listened with amusement--not that the incident hadn't been terrible. Being decapitated was a grisly fate, whether you were a Yankee or not. But then, amusing things happened in battle, as they did in the rest of life. Some of the funniest things he had ever witnessed had occurred during battles. He had always found it more satisfying to laugh on a battlefield than anywhere else, for if you lived to laugh on a battlefield, you could feel you had earned the laugh. But if you just laughed in a saloon, or at a social, the laugh didn't reach deep.

Certainly on the vast windy plain, there was plenty of nothing to be looked at.

-she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn't last long, once they became men.