Well, Jack, damned glad you came, come on in, boy!

For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the...

We danced in the handkerchief-big space between the speak-easy tables, in which stood the plates of half-eaten spaghetti or chicken bones and the bottles of Dago red. For about five minutes the dancing had some...

During all that time I didn’t see Willie. I didn’t see him again until he announced in the Democratic primary in 1930. But it wasn’t a primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the...

I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was...

But for the present I would lie there and know I didn’t have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For...

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where...

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

The best luck always happens to people who don’t need it.

I suppose that Willie had his natural quota of ordinary suspicion and caginess, but those things tend to evaporate when what people tell you is what you want to hear.

you live through . . . that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that...

When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can’t get...

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something(All The King’s Men)

So there are two you’s, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you’s are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on...

…by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it’s too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition,...

He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns.

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

(The law) is like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain’t ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling...

After a great blow, or crisis, after the first shock and then after the nerves have stopped screaming and twitching, you settle down to the new condition of things and feel that all possibility of...

Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may be able...

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

No, the Boss corrected, I’m not a lawyer. I know some law. … but I’m not a lawyer. That’s why I can see what the law is like. It’s like a single-bed blanket on a...

They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren’t any other people there wouldn’t be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only...

There was the bulge and the glitter, and there was the cold grip way down in the stomach as though somebody had laid hold of something in there, in the dark which is you, with...

The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful.

You are dehydrated,” I said. “The result of alcohol taken in excess. But that is the only way to take it. It is the only way to do a man any good.

If you want him to do it, you’ve got to change the picture of the world inside his head.

There ain’t anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you can do and keep your dignity? The human...

BeautyIs the fume-track of necessity. This thought Is therapeutic.If, after severalApplications, you do not findRelief, consult your family physician

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

You meet somebody at the seashore on a vacation and have a wonderful time together. Or in a corner at a party, while the glasses clink and somebody beats on a piano, you talk with...

And the testicles of the fathers hang down like old lace

I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true...

But I don’t know, in the end, what deserts, chasms, achievements, virtues, and beauties have to do with love. We can love for so many different, and paradoxical, qualities in the object of our love–for...