I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.

Fossil energy is the worst discovery man ever made, and his disruption of the carbon-oxygen cycle is the greatest of his triumphs over nature. Through thinner and thinner air we labor toward our last end, conquerors finally of even the earth chemistry that created us.

No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.

Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning together from the vertical which produces the false arch.

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.