Sublime

Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor—poor farmers.

He told us that one reason he and his friends wanted to start the commune and learn to “live off the land” in a simple way was that “we want to be the last people on earth.” Vonnegut said, “Isn’t that kind of a stuck-up kind of thing to want to be?” In the way he spoke and the way he wrote, Vonnegut was always coming up with the plain-spoken words

Another event that cheered Max was his publishing a promising new writer named Morley Callaghan, a Canadian. Callaghan had met Hemingway when their careers at the Toronto Star overlapped; then he went to

The good story lay in half-told things which must be filled in out of the hearer’s own experience.

I can’t say I really know him, but one’s got to help a neighbor, hasn’t one?”

John Steinbeck put it beautifully in East of Eden: Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice

My First Summer in the Sierra