A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.

It has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well and if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it.

I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue.

There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.