Men in Government monopolize the necessary use of force; they are not using their energies productively; they are not milking cows. To get butter, they must use guns; they have nothing else to use.

Our quilts were more than useful, they had the faint sentimentality of a pressed flower. And no more beauty. We did not value them for their appearance, but for the memories in them, for their good wearing qualities and the thrift they represented.

I ask myself, 'why am I so lazy?' and am too lazy to reply.

As an American I am of course fundamentally opposed to democracy and to anyone advocating or defending democracy, which in theory and practice is the basis of socialism.

Life is a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog.

Houses are the abiding joys; they are the most emotion-stirring of all things. An automobile is regarded with fond affection, a typewriter becomes the inseparable companion, clothes can stir sentimentality, and the bit of bric-a-brac is a toy one would weep to see torn away - but houses are real, deep, emotional things. How much excitement in the cutting of a window, what enormous importance in the angle of a roof!

We are never aware of the present; each instant of living becomes perceptible only when it is past, so that in a sense we do not live at all, but only remember living.