“I believe that my observations have always led me to find that the so-called realist moves about the world with a closed mind, ringed as it were with concrete and cement, and that the so-called romantic is like an unfenced garden in and out of which truth can wander at will.”

“A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.”

“Of course the merchandise appears to be cheaper. Because where there are so many things close together, they can hardly help not thinking of themselves as precious. In their own eyes they shrink, and they lower their prices, and they become humble, for humility in good expresses itself as cheapness. And since there are also so many shoppers crowded together, the goods make less of a challenge or an appeal to them; and so they too become humble. If the very large department store looked to begin with like a work of hubris, it comes to seem merely an enormous container for human smalless and modesty; an enormous confession of earthly cheapness.”

“Anyway, I am unfitted to hold down a job anywhere unless they were to pay me for getting angry at the world." 96”

“Astonishing, really, that they still look human. They ought to look like megaphones, like screams, like brutal desires, like beery ecstasies... like decadent barism. But the unconscious drive to remain in God's image seems to be so strong that not even the six-day races can quite eradicate it.”

“Above all there's a lack of personal discipline, manners, decorum, natural discretion. If everyone causes their own individual catastrophes, how can there fail to be more general catastrophes? After all, the passengers on a bus or streetcar make up a community of a kind. But they don't see it that way, not even in a moment of danger. As they see it they are bound always to be the other's enemy: for political, social, all sorts of reasons. Where so much hate has been bottled up, it is vented on inanimate things, and provokes the celebrated perversity of inanimate things. Sending experts into other countries won't help much, so long as each individual refuses to work out his own personal traffic plan. There is a wisdom in the accident of language by which there is a single word, "traffic," for movement in the streets, and for people's dealings with one another.”

“The world to come will be like this triangular railroad junction, raised to some unknown power. The earth has lived through several evolutionary stages - but following always natural laws. It is presently experiencing a new one, which follows constructive, conscious, and no less elemental laws. Regret for the passing of the old forms is like the grief of some antediluvian creature for the disappearance of a prehistoric habitat.”