How much do we remember of what hurts us most? I've been thinking about pain, how each of us constructs our past to justify what we feel now. How each successive pain distorts the preceding.

It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.

The ordinary can be like medicine.

He looked into the crowd for approval, saw his mother and father. He waved and they waved back. Smiles and Indian teeth. They were both drunk. Everything familiar and welcome. Everything beautiful.

Summer coming like a car from down the highway.

Seems like the cold would never go away and winter would be like the bottom of my feet but then it is gone in one night and in its place comes the sun so large and laughable.

The white people always want to fight someone and they always get the dark-skinned people to do the fighting.

More and more, he heard his spine playing stick games through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years.

Thieves and liars kill indirectly, unintentionally, and with no other weapon than their tongues and malice.

I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!

Improving yourself is a lot more profitable than trying to improve others.

I'm a shepherd, not a sheep, and I've always prided myself on being a leader and not a follower.

I am pretty good at arithmetic, and I know that the fight in front of us is a very, very steep fight. But we will continue to fight for every vote and every delegate we can get.

My first lessons lasted two weeks and it was Jingle Bells. It didn't make any sense at all. I wanted to know how to play like Hendrix.

A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible.

[On The Netherlands:] ... the entire country is a kind of saturated sponge.

For dear me, why abandon a belief Merely because it ceases to be true

An orotundity, which I define as Nobelitis a pomposity in which one is treated as representative of more than oneself by someone conscious of representing more than himself.