The people turn in allegiance to Humanity, as surely as water flows downward or as a wild animal takes cover in the wilderness.
The problem with living outside the law is that you no longer have its protection.
No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.
Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only.
I met Lee Harvey Oswald, in Moscow just after he defected. One night I was having dinner with a friend, an Italian newspaper correspondent, and when he came by to pick me up he asked me if I'd mind going with him first to talk to a young American defector, one Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was staying at the Metropole, an old Czarist hotel just off Kremlin Square.
Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolesence [sic] ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you at the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror.
You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.
Man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.
Either you can lie down or you can stand up and say, 'I'm going to be a man about it, go out and deal with the pain and help my team win. '
Well, Dwight was born to be No. 2 and I don't think he would know what to do as a leader. But he loves following. He would have made a great fascist.
At any rate, nothing was more characteristic of him [Walter Benjamin] in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of "pearls" and "coral. " On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection.