Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.

Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.

At best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.

We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!

America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.