Curious how a place unvisited can take such hold on the mind so that the very name sets up a ringing.
Charley: You the one killed our friend? Butler: That's right. I shot the boy, too. And I enjoyed it. [Charley pulls out his gun and shoots Butler]
We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.
[Charley has explained his strategy for the upcoming fight] Boss Spearman: Sounds like you got it all worked out. Charley Waite: Yeah, except the part where we don't get killed.
There are times that one treasures for all one's life, and such times are burned clearly and sharply on the material of total recall. I felt very fortunate that morning.
The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if no other way, we can see the wild an reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index.
The Pacific is my home ocean; I knew it first, grew up on its shore, collected marine animals along the coast. I know its moods, its color, its nature.
When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.
Charley Butts: I turned 35 today. Some birthday! When's your birthday? Frank Morris: I don't know. Charley Butts: Geez, what kind of childhood did you have? Frank Morris: Short.
Don't let the fear of striking out hold you back.
That's what scares me the most, Paul. That I'll just pass through life and all the people I know will just disappear, without a trace, without me ever telling them how much they mean to me, no matter how small the time spent was or how great the frie...
Jesse James: Well, Charley, did you hurt your leg? Charley Ford: Yeah, I slipped... I slipped off the roof and I smacked down into a snow bank, like a ton of stupidness. One second I'm screamin', "Woah Nelly!", Next second, poof, I'm neck-deep in sno...
But it isn't hunger that drives millions of armed American Males to forests and hills every autumn, as the high incidence of heart failure among the hunters will prove. Somehow the hunting process has to do with masculinity, but I don't quite know ho...
Strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others, and this dame was one of them, who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in t...
Relationship Time to Aloneness. And I remember about that. Having a companion fixes you in time and that the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present, and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a foreca...
For 20 years I've been screaming at these guitar companies, saying, 'It's abnormal to put your arm around an acoustic guitar that is about 6 to 8 inches deep.' Your arm reaches over, and you start to strum, and then all of a sudden you get a charley ...
[Charley Waite kicks Button off his horse. He falls into the river] Button: What you do that for? Charley Waite: Cheatin' at cards. Button: I apologized to you for that. [to Boss Spearman] Button: Eh, Boss? I apologized to him for that. Boss Spearman...
Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will ou...
I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed,...
But from the start I had withheld from him any information about the giant redwoods. It seemed to me that a Long Island poodle who had made his devoirs to or might be set apart from other dogs--might even be like that Galahad who saw the Grail. The c...
When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.
