"A water snake glided smoothly up the pool, twisting its periscope head from side to side; and it swam the length of the pool and came to the legs of a motionless heron that stood in the shadows. A silent head and beak lanced down and plucked it out by the head, and the beak swallowed the little snake while its tail waved frantically."

"...and it is generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended. This last, of course, excludes, those dismal slave parties, whipped and controlled and dominated, given by an ogreish professional hostess. These are not parties at all but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis and as interesting as it's end product."

"In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself."

"He stopped, feeling lonely in his long speech."

"...and the break would never come as long as fear can turn to wrath."

"Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra."

"The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer."

"It's all fine to say, "Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget-and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change."

"The wedding was in Monterey, a sombre boding ceremony in a little Protestant chapel. The church had so often seen two ripe bodies die by the process of marriage that it seemed to celebrate a mystic double death with its ritual."

"Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans."

"Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments."

"Curious how a place unvisited can take such hold on the mind so that the very name sets up a ringing."

"Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all."

"What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness."

"War did not make a killer of me, although for a time I killed men."

"One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect itself with thick armour is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the species is on the road to extinction."

"He's got a can up there,' Richard said."

"It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him."

"Courage and fear were one thing too."

"I live alone," he said simply. "I live in the open. I hear the waves at night and see the black patterns of the pine boughs against the sky. With sound and silence and color and solitude, of course I see visions. Anyone would.""But you don't believe in them?" Doc asked hopefully."I don't find it a matter for belief or disbelief," the seer said. "You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks into the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself everytime that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it? Don't you see visions?""No," said Doc."

"It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming."

"He hated old women. They frightened him. There was a smell about them that gave him the willies. They were fierce and they had no price. They never gave a damn about making a scene. They got what they wanted. Louie's grandmother had been a tyrant. She had got whatever she wanted by being fierce."

"Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin' man can talk the murder right out of his mouth an' not to no murder. You done right. Don't you kill nobody if you can help it."

"Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them."

"The weight of knowledge is too great for one mind to absorb."

"Maybe ever'body in the whole damn world is scared of each other."

"It was strange to Old Robert that he, who knew so much more than his neighbors, who had pondered so endlessly, should be not even a good farmer. Sometimes he imagined he understood too many things ever to do anything well."

"When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know it is not. This helps you take the job seriously and do your best on everything you write."

"The words are meaningless except in terms of feeling. Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it."

"They got to live before they can afford to die."

"And as a few strokes on the nose will make a puppy head shy, so a few rebuffs will make a boy shy all over. But whereas a puppy will cringe away or roll on its back, groveling, a little boy may cover his shyness with nonchalance, with bravado, or with secrecy. 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."

"Ghosts could walk freely tonight, without fear of the disbelief of men; for this night was haunted, and it would be an insensitive man who did not know it."

"Sexuality with all its attendant yearnings and pains, jealousies and taboos, is the most disturbing impulse humans have."

"Look here, said Will. "When a man comes to me for advice about an idea, I know he doesn'twant advice. He wants me to agree with him. And if I want to keep his friendship I tell him his idea isfine and go ahead. But I like you and you're a friend of my family, so I'm going to stick my neck out."

"Memory of the knife will be gone when the flesh is gone."

"Henry liked fun and avoided when he could any solemn or serious matter, for he confused these with sorrow."

"He thought of the virtues of courage and forbearance, which become flabby when there is nothing to use them on."

"So in our pride we ordered for breakfast an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of watermelon and two bottles of cream soda."

"It would be a dreadful thing to tell anyone about it, for it would destroy some fragile structure of truth. It was truth that might be shattered by division."

"It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth."

"I always found in myself a dread of west and love of east. Where I ever got such an idea I cannot say, unless it could be that morning came over the peaks of the Gabilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucias. It may be that the birth and death of the day had some part in my feeling about the two ranges of mountains."

"Do you know, I am putting off ending this letter as though the end would be the end of something I want to hold on to. That's not true of course - just a feeling like the quick one of hexing your trip so you couldn't go. The mind is capable of any selfishness and it thinks unworthy things whether you want it or not. Best to admit it is a bad child rather than to pretend it is always a good one. Because a bad child can improve but a good one is a liar and nothing can improve a liar."

"I ain't got no people. I seen the guys that go around on the ranches alone. That ain't no good. They don't have no fun. After a long time they get mean. They get wantin' to fight all the time. . . 'Course Lennie's a God damn nuisance most of the time, but you get used to goin' around with a guy an' you can't get rid of him."

"She used religion as a therapy for the ills of the world and herself, and she changed the religion to fit the ill. When she found that the theosophy she had developed for communication with a dead husband was not necessary, she cast about for some new unhappiness."

"The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty."

"And the women who had thought they wanted dresses never realized that what they had wanted was happiness."

"Relationship Time to Aloneness." Having a companion fixes you in time and that of the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present."

"What pillow can one have like a good conscience?"

"Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless, peacocks and lilies for instance."

"And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And I here make a rule - 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."