Pain does not create a long-lasting memory, but the memory of luxury exerts itself for ever.

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way

My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones.

A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.

... Oceanic malaise. I never saw anyone reading anything more demanding than a comic book. I never heard any youth express an interest in science or art. No one even talked politics. It was all idleness, and whenever I asked someone a question, no matter how simple, no matter how well the person spoke English, there was always a long pause before I got a reply, and I found these Pacific pauses maddening. And there was giggling but no humor - no wit. It was just foolery.