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Whether I improved myself morally by making that change I am not prepared to say. That is one of the questions I mean to ask God on Judgment Day—along with the one about what my sister’s name really was.
The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.
I never knew a writer’s wife who wasn’t beautiful.
“Nobody ever went broke overestimating the vulgarity of the American people,”
He stayed away from all kinds of gatherings because he never could think of anything to say or do without a script.
America had changed in many ways, but it had yet to adopt the metric system.
Fuller had broken the enchantment of summer by the seaside—had reminded all in the drugstore of the black, mysterious passions that were so often the mainsprings of life.
Boy,’ said Edison, ‘it’s always darkest before the dawn. I want you to remember that.’
“Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom,”
Life has left no marks on him, because he hasn’t paid much attention to it.
“I don’t think you’re very funny,” she said. “You knew I was a serious writer when you married me,” he said.
“I’ll have to think a minute,” I said. “That’s a mistake,” he said. “You miss an awful lot of life that way.
“John,” I said, “when you get older, you’re going to understand a lot of things you don’t understand now.”
And the answer to that is that the sky is the limit for a man with drive and creative ambition.
I still catch myself feeling blue about things that don’t matter any more.
Nobody but a saint could be really sympathetic or intelligent for more than a few minutes at a time in a body—or happy, either, except in short spurts.
Or they’ll talk about fear, which we used to call politics—job politics, social politics, government politics.
“And that, sir, means the end of ambition, the end of greatness!” “Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said. “We’ve got some pretty great people on our side. They’d be great in or out of bodies. It’s the end of fear is what it is.” I looked right into the lens of the nearest television camera. “And that’s the most wonderful thing that ever happened to people.”
Oh, there are drawbacks, I guess, the way there are drawbacks to everything.
So I guess maybe that’ll be the next step in evolution—to break clean like those first amphibians who crawled out of the mud into the sunshine, and who never did go back to the sea.
Making sure everybody has a corner like that is about the biggest job we teachers have.
They are like the moon and the planets and the sun and the stars.
I am not a coward, and I do not love comfort more than the improvement of human life.
He said a stone mason would have time and peace in which to think things out.
He did not smile about war, or the things a man in a baby moon or on the moon itself could do to an enemy.
It was just like a bunch of kids with billions of dollars or billions of rubles or whatever.
well, maybe this is how God meant for it to end. I don’t see how it can keep on.
He looked like a machine, but he was a whole lot less like a machine than plenty of people I could name.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum—Say nothing but good of the dead.
