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[Legion Guidry] lifted his chin and rubbed the whiskers on his throat, the cast in his green eyes as ancient and devoid of moral light as those in a prehistoric, scale-covered creature breaking from the egg.

[H]e said softly before he slept again that the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty to any of it. Not just the coming of war. Anything at all.

He looked fourteen going on some age that never was. He looked as if he'd been sitting there and God made the trees and rocks around him. He looked like his own reincarnation and then his own again. Above all else he looked to be filled with a terrible sadness. As if he harbored news of some horrendous loss that no one else had heard of yet. Some vast tragedy of the way the world was.

When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood's alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was that nothing save blo0od had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to destroy it.

In Thalia, winter was always duller than summer. In the winter it was too cold to sit around on the square and think up meanness to do -- if they wanted to sit around they had to do it in the cafe, and that cost money. When the square became empty because of the cold, the town seemed emptier than ever.

Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it usually came on him in the mornings early, when the streets were completely empty, the way they were one Saturday morning in late November.

Don't believe what they tell you. There's nothing above us, and nothing beneath. Just us, here and now, like survivors of a shipwreck.

The situation outlined is immaterial to us. We could help humanity, but there is no reason that we should. Humanity is a transient factor and none of our concern.

Oh Lordy, all of it, everything, requires skill -- to be ill, to be lonely, to be homeless: each of these things is an art, each requires talent and effort.

But he was in the US, and his prospects were grim. So bad were his personal circumstances that he was forced to borrow sums as small as seventy-five cents, and under the date of May 2 there is the following entry in his journal: 'Started down the Bowery, sold damaged old hat to make a raise of 37 c[en]ts.'

After ten hours of search, they found [John Brown's] body. He lay face up on the ice, his hands at his side, the snow around him showing signs of his struggle to get up before he had finally surrendered to sleep and death. Burial in the winter posed a problem, and they left him where he died, covering him with ice and snow. With the coming of June thaws, Brown's body would sink into the bay.

When you fail to recognize that this whole world is a phantasmagoria, an amazing illusion, a weaving of smoke, and you try to hold on to it, then you will suffer seriously.

The uprising I witnessed terrified me for the rest of my life; I know what it looks like when freedom falls into inexperienced hands. Idle chatter always ends in blood. War is a wolf that can come to your door as well....

Does anyone care about this any more? Show me -- who? It hasn't been useful or interesting to anyone for a long time. Our country doesn't exist any more, and it never will, but here we are ... old and disgusting ... with our terrifying memories and poisoned eyes. We're right here! But what's left of our past?

Everything was simpler in our old life: one pair of boots for all seasons, one coat, one pair of pants. We were raised like young warriors in ancient Sparta: If the Motherland called, we'd sit on a hedgehog for her.

Our era is evil. Empty. We're drowning in flashy rags and VCRs. Where is our great country? The way we are now, we'd never triumph over anyone: Gagarin wouldn't have even gotten off the ground.

A communist is someone who's read Marx, an anticommunist is someone who's understood him.

I began this "Book of Friends" about two years ago with the idea of rendering homage to them. Most of them are unknown to the public at large.

There is something disturbing about this corner of America, ... a sinister suggestion of transience. There is a quality, hostile to men in the very earth and air here. As if we were not meant to make our homes in this oddly enervating sunshine.... California will be a silent desert again. It is all as impermanent and brittle as a reel of film. (J B Priestley)

Southern California was a land where iceboxes and furnaces were unknown, where mildew never gathered, and where mad dogs did not roam the land. It was a land in which there were no traps or pitfalls, no beasts of prey, no poisonous reptiles, no loathsome pests. (!?)

W D Howells to Henry James: I should hardly like to trust pen and ink with all the audacity of my social ideas; but after fifty years of optimistic contact with 'civilization' and its ability to come out all right in the end, I now abhor it, and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end unless it bases itself anew on a real equality.

Henry James: "It was a joke, polished by much use, that I was dreadfully at sea about my native land."

In the Western Reserve, where he had lived, Boston was a sort of holy city. The people had largely come from New England, and those who cared for letters regarded Boston as many of the Bostonians regarded London. It was the hub of the universe....

He called it "going into the tunnel," an expression of his own, for his private use, which he never used in talking to anyone else, least of all to his wife.

I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,—not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,—and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them. Your so-called wise man goes trying to persuade himself that there is no entity there but himself and his traps, but it is a great deal easier to believe the truth.

Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and 78 fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. It