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

I think its a sickness to grieve too much for those who never cared a fig for you.

I don't see how being married could be any worse than listening to you talk for twenty years, but that still ain't much of a recommendation for it.

Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain't much of a crime.

Most young dealers of the Silicon Chip Era regard a reference library as merely a waste of space. Old Timers on the West Coast seem to retain a fondness for reference books that goes beyond the practical. Everything there is to know about a given volume may be only a click away, but there are still a few of us who'd rather have the book than the click. A bookman's love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.

Americans' lack of passion for history is well known. History may not quite be bunk, as Henry Ford suggested, but there's no denying that, as a people, we sustain a passionate concentration on the present and the future.

Through my college years, topping that ridge had always given me a great sense of being home, but time had diminished the emotion and I had begun to suspect that home was less a place than an empty page.