What have I to leave you but the ruins of old courage, and the lore of old gallantry and hope?

You went off to find Tobias so you could contaminate his good Lutheran mind with nonsense about gunslingers and federal marshals.

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those

Of all people on this earth he must be the hardest one to have a conversation with.

I hate to think what I would give for a thousand mornings like this. For two or three. You were wearing your red shirt and your mother was wearing her blue dress.

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all.

These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.

I was always amazed, watching grownups, at the way they seemed to know what was to be done in any situation, to know what was the decent thing.

I do try to write the way I think. But of course that all changes as soon as I put it into words.