War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war. - William Faulkner

There were railroads in the wilderness now; people who used to go overland by carriage or horseback to the River landings for the Memphis and New Orleans steamboats could take the train from almost anywhere now. And presently Pullmans too, all the way from Chicago and the Northern cities and the Northern money, the Yankee dollars arriving between sheets and even in drawing rooms to open the wilderness, nudge it further and further toward obsolescence with the whine of saws; what had been one vast unbroken virgin span was now booming with cotton and timber both. Or rather, booming with simple money: increment's troglodyte which had fathered twin ones: solvency and bankruptcy, the three of them booming money into the land so fast now that the problem was to get rid of it before it whelmed you into strangulation.

Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.

I kept thinking that. I don’t know why it is I can’t seem to learn that a woman’ll do anything.