“i was poised for greatness, but the poising game me a cramp so i have instead just settled for comfortable mediocrity... (Vimrod # 4904)”

“They wanted you to grow up into some helpless combination of old person and infant. They wanted you to have a house and a family and a refrigerator and a TV, and not know how any of it worked. They wanted you to spend your life working on something that was never concrete, never anything you could see or hold in your hands, and if you didn't do that they wanted to put you in jail. Cutting down forests, poisoning the earth - it was a country driven by stupid, blind impulse. It was a country where nobody knew where their food came from or where their garbage went, they just flushed the bowl, kept eating it and throwing it away, building bombs and computers, cars and TVs, sending people off to Vietnam so they could set it on fire. It was a country that had turned against everyone he knew, cast them out like garbage, and all they could do was smile to themselves at all they'd learned and wait patiently for the fires to start here at home.”

“Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.”

“I will not get upset over men, but instead be poised and cool ice-queen.”

“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”

“He had bucked harder with me than the fellows expected him to, and I don't know how I stayed on. I guess I was just too scared to fall off. Anyway, Mr. Cooper shook hands with me after Hi lifted me down. He said, "By God, you're going to make a cow poke, Little Britches. As long as you're with me you can call him your own horse." Then he laughed, and said to the other men, "I thought, by God, the kid was going to pull that one-inch hackamore rope in two before the music stopped."Father never swore, and I know I wouldn't ever have said it out loud, but before I really knew what I was thinking, "By God, I thought so, too," went through my head.”

“It's because we have little faith that we look within instead of without.”