...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.

For the truth is a terrible thing.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.

How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.

To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea.

You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.