It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

And so we beat on, books against the critics, borne back ceaslessly into rewrites.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.

I talk with the authority of failure.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of the individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye.

She shut her eyes and he could see that the lids were trembling. Dear little Dot, life is so damned hard. She was crying upon his shoulder. So damned hard, so damned hard, he repeated aimlessly; it just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does. Frantic

Professor Dohmler raised himself like a legless man mounting a pair of crutches.

Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything.

And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life—not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things.

I feel like I fell short in Rio.