Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves

Time is so strange and life is twice as strange. You must promise me not to live to be too old, William. It if is at all convenient, die before you're fifty. It my take a bit of doing. But I advise this is simply because there is no telling when another Helen Loomis might be born. It would be dreadful, wouldn't it, if you lived on to be very very old and some afternoon in 1999 walked down Main street and saw me standing there, aged twenty-one, and the whole thing out of balance again?

And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying face of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman.

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.