My face has not ignored the passage of time, but recorded it with scars, lines, furrows, and erosions.

A sad soul can kill you much quicker, far quicker, than a germ.

I feel that there are too many realities. What I set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style.

...but our morning eyes describe a different world than do our afternoon eyes, and surely our wearied evening eyes can report only a weary evening world.

He put my sins in a new perspective. Where as they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten, this minister gave them some size and dignity. I hadn't been thinking very well of myself for some years, but if my sins had this dimension there was some pride left. I wasn't a naughty child but a first rate sinner, and I was going to catch it.

[Steinbeck without a rabies certificate for Charley, his immunized dog] And it is usually so with governments- not a fact but a small slip of paper.

[at the US-Canadian boarder]
"You should not write anything in your passport. That's the regulation"
"I won't ever do it again. I promise." And I wanted to promise him I wouldn't lie or steal or associate with person's of loose morals, or covet my neighbor's wife, or anything.

John Steinbeck in Travels with Charley In search of America