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.

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

It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.

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

A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.

Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?... Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?