Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

Harrogate saw them going along Blount Avenue Sunday morning. They wore outfits all cut from the same bolt of cloth and in the church pew standing six across they looked like a strip of gaudy...

He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath...

The things I believed in dont exist any more. It’s foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see...

There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.

People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.

Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle...

The freedom of birds is an insult to me.

There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at...

It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless Paraclete beleaguered with all...

He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of...

After a while he said: It’s not about knowin where 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...

There is no God and we are his prophets.

It was an old hunter in camp and the hunter shared tobacco with him and told him of the buffalo and the stands he’d made against them, laid up in a sag on some rise...

They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey.

Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and pu...

Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.

And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the...

All other trades are contained in that of war.Is that why war endures?No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.That’s your...

His feet went banging down some stairs. He closed his eyes. They went through cinders and dirt, his heels gathering small windrows of trash. A dim world receded above his upturned toes, shapes of skewed...

Do you think I lie to you?No.But you think I might lie to you about dying.Yes.Okay. I might. But we’re not dying.Okay.

Maybe it’s not logical. I don’t know. I don’t care. I’ve been asked didnt I think it odd that I should be present to witness the death of everything and I do think it’s odd...

Just take me with you. Please.I cant.Please, Papa.I cant. I cant hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.You forget some things, dont you?Yes. You forget what you want to remember and...

He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men’s claims to know God’s mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.

When I was in school I studied biology. I learned that in making their experiments scientists will take some group–bacteria, mice, people–and subject that group to certain conditions. They compare the results with a second...

In my father’s last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I...

I dont believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamour and din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And...

I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones...

Most people’ll run from their own mother to get to hug death by the neck. They cant wait to see him.

E se eu te dissesse que ele é um deus?O velho abanou a cabeça. Já não acredito em nada disso. Deixei de acreditar há anos. Onde os homens não conseguem viver, os deuses não têm...

Dope.They sell that shit to schoolkids.It’s worse than that.How’s that?Schoolkids buy it.

A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Wil or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to...

Live by yourself and you bound to talk yourself and when ye commence that folks start it up that you’re light in the head. But I reckon it’s all right to talk to a dog...

I dont know what happens to country.

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to...

Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs

The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth cant compete. but I dont believe that. I think...

The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to...

He rose and turned toward the lights of town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had...

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.

Men do not turn from God so easily. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot e fled nor hid from. To imagine...

The names of entities that have the power to constrain us change with time. Convention and authority are replaced by infirmity. But my attitude toward them has not changed. Has not changed.

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each...

Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else.

Now the son whose father’s existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a...

The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness...

I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.