p. 71 Trexler walked dizzily through the empty waiting room and the doctor followed along to let him out. It was late; the secretary had shut up shop and gone home. Another day over the dam.
p. 87 A writer goes about his task today with the extra satisfaction that comes from knowing that he will be the first to have his head lopped off – even before political dandies. In my own case this is a double satisfaction, for if freedom were denied me by force of earthly circumstance, I am the same as dead and would infinitely prefer to go into fascism without my head than with it, having no use for it any more and not wishing to be saddled with so heavy an encumbrance.
p. 99 [editor’s note] In the swirl of language that is modern life, no one can afford to forget that ignorant and evil people use abstractions with powerful connotation to obscure thinking rather than clarify meaning. Anyone can nod his head in agreement when a large abstraction like justice or extremism is dropped like an olive into an oratorical cocktail, while at the same moment never noticing that he is agreeing with his own meaning of the word, not the speaker’s.
p. 107 I know that quite frequently in the course of delivering himself of a poem a poet will find himself in possession of a lyric bauble – a line as smooth as velvet to the ear, as pretty as a feather to the eye, yet a line definitely out of plumb with the frame of the poem. What to do with a trinket like this is always troubling to a poet, who is naturally grateful to his Muse for small favors. Usually he just drops the shining object into the body of the poem somewhere and hopes it won’t look too giddy.
p. 159 The dinner date seemed a familiar conflict: I move in a desultory society and often a week or two will roll by without my going to anybody’s house to dinner or anyone’s coming to mine, but when an occasion does arise, and I am summoned, something usually turns up (an hour or two in advance) to make all human intercourse seem vastly inappropriate. I have come to believe that there is in hostesses a special power of divination, and that they deliberately arrange dinners to coincide with pig failure or some other sort of failure.
p. 166 I noticed that although [my dachshund Fred] weighed far less than the pig, he was harder to drag, being possessed of the vital spark.
p. 182 I discovered by test that fully ninety per cent of whatever was on my desk at any given moment were IN things. Only ten per cent were OUT things – almost too few to warrant a special container. This, in general, must be true of other people’s lives too. It is the reason lives get so cluttered up – so many things (except money) filtering in, so few things (except strength) draining out.
p. 185 I think the best writing is often done by persons who are snatching the time from something else – from an occupation, or from a profession, or from a jail term – something that is either burning them up, as religion, or love, or politics, or that is boring them to tears, as prison, or a brokerage house, or an advertising firm.
p. 187 Physically I am better fitted for writing than for farming, because farming takes great strength and endurance. Intellectually I am better fitted for farming than writing.
p. 223 Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don’t write about Man, write about a man.
p. 231 On the porch was a distorting mirror, to give the traveler a comical image of himself, who had miraculously learned to gaze in an ordinary glass without smiling.
p. 269 Living things are always harder to lift, somehow, than inanimate objects, and I think any mover would rather walk up three flights with a heavy bureau than go into a waltz with a rubber plant. There is really no way for a man to put his arms around a big house plant and still remain a gentleman.
p. 289 Up to the farmhouse to dinner through the teeming, dusty field, the road under our sneakers was only a two-track road. The middle track was missing, the one with the marks of the hooves and splotches of dried, flaky manure. There had always been three tracks to choose from in choosing which track to walk in; now the choice was narrowed down to two. For a moment I missed terribly the middle alternative.
p. 297 It has been ambitious and plucky of me to attempt to describe what is indescribable, and I have failed, as I knew I would. But I have discharged my duty to my society; and besides, a writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him.
