“It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Arrival often brings nothing but a sense of desolation and disappointment.”

“I'm getting too elderly to travel the length of the country for a free hangover.”

“I wasn't good enough. I had a little talent but not enough. There is nothing more discouraging than having just a little talent.”

“Things happen they way they're meant to. There's a pattern and a shape to everything...Nothing happens without a reason...Nothing is impossible...(Page 180).”

“It was good and nothing good is ever lost.”

“It was better not to get too close to another person. The closer you got, the more likely you were to get hurt.”

“Marriage isn't a love affair. It isn't even a honeymoon. It's a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they've worked at anything in their lives before. If it's a good marriage, it changes, it evolves, but it does on getting better. I've seen it with my own mother and father. But a bad marriage can dissolve in a welter of resentment and acrimony. I've seen that, too, in my own miserable and disastrous attempt at making another person happy. And it's never one person's fault. It's the sum total of a thousand little irritations, disagreements, idiotic details that in a sound alliance would simply be disregarded, or forgotten in the healing act of making love. Divorce isn't a cure, it's a surgical operation, even if there are no children to consider.”