The most important thing is insight, that is to be - curious - to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

Well, Bud," he said, looking at me, "I'll be damned if you don't go to a lot of trouble to have your fun. Kidnapping, then fighting. What do you do on your holidays? Burn houses?

It's not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.

The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it.

I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.

Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.

…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.