Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.

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

Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.

Every time. You know why? I want to fail. I work like a dog for twenty years so I'll have the supreme pleasure of failing. Never knew anybody like that, did you? I'm very cunning. I plan it in advance. I fool myself right up to the last minute, and then the time comes and I know how cunningly I've been planning it all the time. I've been a failure all my life.

You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.

History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.

If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.