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Momma could not take the smallest achievement for granted. People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all.

49 - “the Depression, at least, did not discriminate”

Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered - Marcus Aurelius

Maybe the knowledge is too great and maybe men are growing too small. Maybe kneeling down to atoms, they’re becoming atom-sized in their souls. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And this what any specialist misses - the whole world over his fence.

If you’re being honest - why not say you are enjoying this beating you’re giving yourself? Why not be just what you are and do just what you do? By whipping himself he protected himself against whipping by someone else

“Try to believe that things are neither so good nor so bad as they seem to you now”

“I know that sometimes a lie is used in kindness. I don’t believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost. That’s a running sore.”

I know that it might be better for you to come out from under your might have beens, into the winds of the world. I am myself sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under the barroom floor for the bits of gold dust. It’s a small mining. You’re too young a man to be panning memories. You should be getting yourself some new ones so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.

Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? Maybe you’re playing a part in a great stage with only yourself as audience. Is it a good feeling to me your life lie fallow?

My sister Mary did not want to be a girl.

“Some people think it’s an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well. But the time poultice is no respecter of glories. Everyone gets well if he waits around.”

“Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true. You’re going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.”

“ it humility, or a deep disbelief in myself, forced me to do a magic to bring up to the surface the thing I know anyway.

I don’t know where being a good servant came into disrepute. It is the refuge of a philosopher, the food of the lazy, and properly carried out it is a position of power, even love

There are no ugly questions except those clothes in condescension

Pidgin they expect, and pidgin they’ll listen to. But English from me they don’t listen to, and so they don’t understand it.

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.

“And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.” Pg 6