I think there must have been some other girl printed somewhere in his heart, for he was a man of love and his wife was not a woman to show her feelin… - John Steinbeck

The compass simply represents the ideal, present but unachievable, and sight-steering a compromise with perfection which allows your boat to exist at all.

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.

[On neighbors looking over his camper:] I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation — a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any here... nearly every American hungers to move.