(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.

It's better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up here in the North.

One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.

When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.

What is seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on.

A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books appear almost accidentally, like a sudden surge in the stock market. There are books of high quality that are a part of the culture, but that is not the same. They are a part of it. They aren't carrying it anywhere. They may talk about insanity sympathetically, for example, because that's the standard cultural attitude. But they don't carry any suggestion that insanity might be something other than sickness or degeneracy.