“There’s a difference between quittin and knowin when you’re beat.”

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that’s just about the best kind of luck you can have.

Words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.

Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I’d made before it.

But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse.

He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.

The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

It is personal. That’s what an education does. It makes the world personal.

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won’t even be recognizable.

And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all.

Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.

Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.

How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

It is better to lose and win, than win and be defeated.

In private enterprises men may advance or recede, whereas they who aim at empire have no alternative between the highest success and utter downfall.

My computer beat me at checkers, but I sure beat it at kickboxing.

The camembert with its venison scent defeats the Marolles and Limbourg dull smells; It spreads its exhalation, smothering the other scents under its surprising breath abundance.

The victory always has a lot of parents but the defeat is always an orphan.

Do not be afraid of defeat. You are never so near victory as when you are defeated in a good cause.

Excesses accomplish nothing. Disorder immediately defeats itself.

It is defeat that turns bone to flint; it is defeat that turns gristle to muscle; it is defeat that makes men invincible. Do not then be afraid of defeat. You are never so near to victory as when defeated in a good cause.