“As you were, I was. As I am, you will be.”

“I think I'm going to have to get a flying license very soon, and maybe one of those Lear jets. It beats motorcycles all to hell.”

“we left about midnight and walked down the hill in silence. the night was muggy, and all around me i felt the same pressure, a sense of time rushing by while it seemed to be standing still. whenever i thought of time in puerto rico, i was reminded of those old magnetic clocks that hung on the walls of my classrooms in high school. every now and then a hand would not move for several minutes -- and if i watched it long enough, wondering if it had finally broken down, the sudden click of the hand jumping three for four notches would startle me when it came.”

“The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America (is that it) has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists.”

“If we get chased out of Iraq with our tail between our legs, that will be the fifth consecutive Third-world country with no hint of a Navy or an Air Force to have whipped us in the past 40 years.”

“Write till your ink be dry, and with your tearsMoist it again, and frame some feeling lineThat may discover such integrity.”

“It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.”

“My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.”

“Nor age so eat up my invention.”

“Ideas are the very coinage of your brain.”

“Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget'st so long / To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?”

“O, how full of briers is this working-day world!”

“O time, thou must untangle this, not I. It is too hard a knot for me t'untie.”

“It is as easy to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover.”

“Things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing.”

“Science finds it methods.”

“Not in his goals but in his transitions, man is great.”

“In winter's tedious nights sit by the fire With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales Of woeful ages, long ago betid”

“Her father lov'd me; oft invited me;Still question'd me the story of my life,From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,That I have pass'd.”

“Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.”

“Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark, what discord follows!”

“Just as the sentence contains one idea in all its fullness, so the paragraph should embrace a distinct episode; and as sentences should follow one another in harmonious sequence, so paragraphs must fit into another like the automatic couplings of railway carriages.”

“The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order.”