A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

...America didn't have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way ... We weren't starving, we weren't bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.

Live or die but don't poison everything.

But she's a nut, and nuts win.

The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.

There are times when the most practical thing is to lie down.

The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.