Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

It is something - it can be everything - to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.

You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur.

The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.

History was part of the baggage we threw overboard when we launched ourselves into the New World.

Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time.

American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.

Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly