Life ... is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfini...shed business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was so long since I'd seen masses of young men that I'd forgotten how much pleasanter men of between twenty and thirty were to ...be around with than older men. It isnt so true of women. When I was in my twenties I thought the grown adults I ran into were a disaster and now I know I was right.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sabra Cravat: I should think you'd be ashamed of yourself. Mooning around with an Indian hired girl. Cim Cravat: Ruby isn't a...n Indian hired girl. She's the daughter of an Osage chief. Sabra Cravat: Osage, fiddlesticks. Cim Cravat: She's just as important in the Osage nation as, well, as Alice Roosevelt is in Washington.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adults have their defense against time; it is called "responsibility," and once one assumes it he can transform his life into a se...t of routines which will account for all those hours when he is stale or tired. It is not size or age or childishness that separates children from adults. It is "responsibility." Adults come in all sizes, ages, and differing varieties of childishness, but as long as they have "responsibility" we recognize, often by the light gone out of their eyes, that they are what we call grownup. When grownups cope with "responsibility" for enough number of years they are retired from it. They are given, in exchange, a "leisure problem." They sit around with their "leisure problem" and try to figure out what to do with it. Sometimes they go crazy. Sometimes they get other jobs. Sometimes it gets too much for them and they die. They have been handed an undetermined future of nonresponsible time and they don't know what to do about it. And that is precisely the way it is with children. Time is the everpresent factor in their lives. It passes slowly or fast, always against their best interests: good time is over in a minute; bad time takes forever. Short on "responsibility," they are confronted with a "leisure problem."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There came a burst of thunder sound; The boy--Oh! where was he?... MAsk of the winds, that far around With fragments strewed the sea;--LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
i am always amazed at their certainty about the past how it could have been... different could have been turned around with what ease they transport themselves to another time place taking the comfort confidence of an after dinner drinkLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house--in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room... he's rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'm coming home. I remember your saying when I left that people were dying and that I was crapping around with fate to come here. ...You were more right than you could imagine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children..., as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,--a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »