“a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.”

“A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. but it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he cant escape from”

“he'd once believed that the answer lay somehow in themusic he created, he suspected now that He'd been mistaken. The more he thought about it, the more he'd come to realize that for him, music had always been a movement away from reality rather than a means of living in it more deeply. .. he now knew that burying himself in music had less to do with God than a selfish desire to escape.”

“Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble?Making life means makingtrouble. There’s only one way of escaping trouble; and that’s killing things.”

“He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, than a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.”

“He was the average mortal. It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.”