Only when the clock stops does time come to life

Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone.

Really the writer doesn't want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

...It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.

The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.