p. 10 Steering a car toward home is a very different experience from steering a car toward a rostrum.
p. 47 I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
p. 97 No longer is a small town autonomous - it is a creature of the state and of the Federal Government.
p. 111 But I feel sadness at All Last Things, too, which is probably a purely selfish, or turned-in, emotion - sorrow not at my dog's death but at my own, which hasn't even occurred yet but which saddens me just to think about in such pleasant surroundings.
p. 127 Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.
p. 135 "The trouble today," [de Madariaga] wrote, "is that the Communist world understands unity but not liberty, while the free world understands liberty but not unity. Eventual victory may be won by the first of the two sides to achieve the synthesis of both liberty and unity."
p. 147 ...so many million dollars spent on the idea that our trains and our motorcars should go fast and smoothly, and the child remembering, not the smoothness, but the great--big--BUMP.
p. 165 Men [nowadays] go to saloons to gaze at televised events instead of to think long thoughts.
p. 182 "She is at that enviable moment in life (I thought) when she believes she can go once around the ring, make one complete circuit, and at the end be exactly the same age as at the start."
p. 185 The only sense that is common, in the long run, is the sense of change - and we all instinctively avoid it, and object to the passage of time, and would rather have none of it.
p. 210 ...there is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.
p. 247 It is strange how much you can remember about places like that once you allow your mind to return into the grooves that lead back. You remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of another thing.
p. 301 "This curious world which we inhabit is far more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used." He would see that today ten thousand engineers are busy making sure that the world shall be convenient even if it is destroyed in the process, and others are determined to increase its usefulness even though its beauty is lost somewhere along the way.
p. 303 Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
p. 323 [From Strunk] "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
p. 363 [From his Aunt Caroline in her nineties] 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.' I cherish the rememberance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive world.
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