Gold Coast

What these people were trying to create or re-create here in this new world is beyond me. I can't put myself in their minds or their hearts, but I can sympathize with their struggle for an identity, with their puzzlement, which has troubled Americans from the very beginning - Who are we, where do we fit in, where are we going?

I wasn't sure about that, but one never knows. Sometimes a neighborhood, like a culture or civilization, is strong enough to absorb and acculturate any number of newcomers. But I don't know if that's true around here any longer. The outward forms and appearances look the same - [...]- but the substance has been altered.

An Englishman once said that he found it easier to be a member of a club than of the human race because the bylaws were shorter, and he knew all the members personally. That sounds about right.

There is no harder worker than a former government employee who has discovered the word incentive.

But if I could choose how and when I wanted to die, I would want to be an eighty-year-old man shot by a jealous young husband who had caught me in bed with his teenage wife.

Well, no one ever said the truth would make you happy—only free.

Indeed we all try to raise our children as if our past experiences are important for their future, but they rarely are.

But that's all hindsight. That evening, my mind was cloudy, and my good judgment was influenced by my need to prove something. It goes to show you, you shouldn't stay out too late during the week.

and there was that pregnant silence in the air, the silence between a husband and wife who have just had words, and it is unlike any other silence except perhaps the awful stillness you hear between the flash of an atomic bomb and the blast. Five, four, three, two, one.

In America if you’re poor, you’re worse than a criminal. You’re nobody.

And there was a time, you know, not so long ago, as recently as my own childhood in fact, when everyone believed in the future and eagerly awaited it or rushed to meet it. But now nearly everyone I know or used to know is trying to slow the speed of the world as the future starts to look more and more like someplace you don't want to be.

I honestly don’t know how anyone functions in this society without a law degree.

Oddly enough, I didn’t recall feeling that way the week before. I wasn’t certain how this revelation came about, but revelations are like that; they just smack you across the face one day, and you know you’ve arrived at the truth without even knowing you were looking for it. What you do about it is another matter. I

A boat is sort of a litmus test for relationships, the close quarters and solitude compelling people into either a warm bond or into mutiny and murder. As

there are brief enchanted moments in history and in the short lives of men and women, there is wonder and there is cynicism, there are dreams that can come true, and dreams that can’t. And there was a time, you know, not so long ago, as recently as my own childhood in fact, when everyone believed in the future and eagerly awaited it or rushed to meet it. But now nearly everyone I know or used to know is trying to slow the speed of the world as the future starts to look more and more like someplace you don’t want to be.