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“Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die”

“The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.”

“It was really darling.” “It sounds darling.”

“Maybe it’s true that we are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous.”

“You had to crave something to be dishonest.”

“It’s hard to give people things—I guess it’s harder to be given things, though.”

“She felt hurt that he had agreed so easily, and she laughed sourly at herself that she could ask a thing and be hurt when she got it.”

“I’m my own. I don’t have to be you.”

“And once a boy has suffered rejection, he will find rejection even where it does not exist—or, worse, will draw it forth from people simply by expecting it.”

“In their millions the frog songs seemed to have a beat and a cadence, and perhaps it is the ears’ function to do this just as it is the eyes’ business to make stars twinkle.”

“I don’t want them to be sad. I hope I’m not so small-souled as to take satisfaction in being missed.”

“And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.”

“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”

“Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have […] A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil?”

“Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally? […] It’s one of the great fallacies that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.”

“And memory.”

“Yes, memory. Without that, time would be unarmed against us.”

“It’s the lie I’m thinking of. It might infect everything. If they ever found out you’d lied to them about this, the true things would suffer. They wouldn’t believe anything then.”

“It was not laziness if he was a rich man. Only the poor were lazy. Just as only the poor were ignorant. A rich man who didn’t know anything was spoiled or independent.”

“The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind. […] The human is the only guilty animal.”

“…a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting—only the deeply personal and familiar.”

“And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden.”

“Names are a great mystery. I’ve never known whether the name is molded by the child or the child changed to fit the name.”

“I don’t very much believe in blood,” said Samuel. “I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.”

“You can’t make a race horse of a pig.”

“No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.”

“When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.”

“The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.”

“You’re going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing.”

“The only way to make any money is to sell something somebody else makes.”

“Some people exude their futures, good or bad.”

“Sheesh—you almost ruin a mission one time and all of a sudden you have an alien-enforced bedtime.”

“Yeah! Think about it. Gravity is what determines how fast an animal can run. Higher gravity, more time spent in contact with the ground. Faster movement. I think animal intelligence, ultimately, has to be faster than gravity.”

“Thing is, when stupid ideas work, they become genius ideas.”