“Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.”

It’s not about knowing who you are. It’s about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. or anybody’s. You dont start over. That’s what it’s about. Every step you take is forever. You can’t make it go away. None of it.

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.

You just need people with the desire to better themselves.

If I were called upon to define briefly the word Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the senses preceive in nature, seen through the veil of the soul.

Sorrow is brief but joy is endless.

Illusion is brief, but repentance is long.

If matter mute and inanimate, though changed by the forces of Nature into a multitude of forms, can never die, will the spirit of man suffer annihilation when it has paid a brief visit, like a royal guest, to this tenement of clay?

Certainly any president – Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative – should keep an open mind until they get the briefing.

This is a brief life, but in its brevity it offers us some splendid moments, some meaningful adventures.

For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.