The Winter of Our Discontent

There's nobody as lonely as an all-married man.

No one wants advice — only corroboration.

Can you disbelieve in something you don't know about? […] It isn't that I don't believe but that I don't know.

Like most modern people, I don't believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.

Strength and success— they are above morality, above criticism. It seems then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it.

Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.

There's something desirable about anything you're used to as opposed to something you're not.

A secret's a terribly lonesome thing.

To be alive at all is to have scars.

"Ellen, only last night, asked, 'Daddy, when will we be rich?' But I did not say to her what I know: 'We will be rich soon, and you who handle poverty badly will handle riches equally badly.' And that is true. In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms."

All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.

A man is a lonely thing.

Not only the brave get killed, but the brave have a better chance of it.

The things everyone knows are most likely to be wrong.

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody.

… we've got so many laws you can't breathe without breaking something.

A crime is something someone else commits.

In the dusk I saw her smile, that incredible female smile. It is called wisdom but it isn't that but rather an understanding that makes wisdom unnecessary.

Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is — and a woman too, I guess.

The misery stayed, not thought about but aching away, and sometimes I would have to ask myself, Why do I ache? Men can get used to anything, but it takes time.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

Does anyone ever know even the outer fringe of another? What are you like in there? Mary — do you hear? Who are you in there?

"I'm sorry," Ethan said. "You have taught me something — maybe three things, rabbit footling mine. Three things will never be believed — the true, the probable, and the logical. I know now where to get the money to start my fortune."

When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something—anything—before it is all gone.

Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn’t do anything about it.

Failure is a state of mind. It’s like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it.

When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people. Maybe that means — hell, it's complicated.

We can shoot rockets into space but we can’t cure anger or discontent.

For the most part people are not curious except about themselves.

Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?

The incident seemed to prove to me that intentions, good or bad, are not enough.

It is odd how a man believes he can think better in a special place. I have such a place, have always had it, but I know it isn't thinking I do there, but feeling and experiencing and remembering. It's a safety place — everyone must have one, although I never heard a man tell of it.

They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren't so unlike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people's property.

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers.

Even if teen-age children aren't making a sound, it's quieter when they're gone. They put a boiling in the air around them. As they left, the whole house seemed to sigh and settle. No wonder poltergeists infest only houses with adolescent children.

You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.

If you want to keep a friend never test him.

I guess we're all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn't explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn't explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic, because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.

What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately.

What a wonderful thing a woman is. I can admire what they do even if I don't understand why.

Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future.

I guess I’m trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again.

My dreams are the problems of the day stepped up to absurdity, a little like men dancing, wearing the horns and masks of animals.

Sometimes it's great fun to be silly, like children playing statues and dying of laughter. And sometimes being silly breaks the even pace and lets you get a new start.

People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don’t dream at all.

It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.

Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?

I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.