Sublime

And on the evening of October 27, sixty-seven farmers—sixty-seven men who had given their lives to their land, and then had received notices saying that the land would be taken away from them—trooped onto the broad, shady porch of Dick Kleberg’s enormous home overlooking the Gulf in Corpus Christi to meet there with the men who had sent the notices

He took all his pain and what was left of his strength and his long gone pride and he put it against the fish’s agony and the fish came over onto his side and swam gently on his side, his bill almost touching the planking of the skiff and started to pass the boat, long, deep, wide, silver and barred with purple and interminable in the water.

“What our readers hunger for,” I was told by Clifton Fadiman, a pillar of the club’s board of judges from 1944 until his death in 1999, “is books that explain. William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich explained a whole age to us.” A majority of the club’s biggest sellers, Fadiman pointed out, have been books that readers found helpf

For Henry David Thoreau, the sentence was the harvest gleaned in a writer’s brain. ‘The fruit a thinker bears is sentences,’ he wrote

temerity,

You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.

Before the inland sea the valley must have been a forest. And those things had happened right under our feet. And it seemed to me sometimes at night that I could feel both the sea and the redwood forest before it.