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

We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us.

Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly

It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part.

It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.

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

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.