The idea that America exists in a culture of violence is bullshit. What America exists in is a culture of Kardashian.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it started.

How much courage does it take to fire up your tractor and plow under a crop you spent six or seven years growing? How much courage to go on and do that after you've spent all that time finding out how to prepare the soil and when to plant and how much to water and when to reap? How much to just say, "I have to quit these peas. Peas are no good for me, I better try corn or beans.

There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.

Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family.

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.