“Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them.”

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.

There is no God and we are his prophets.