“Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated.”

Source: Isaiah's Job (1936), IV
Context: In any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them. You can be sure of those — dead sure, as our phrase is — but you will never be able to make even a respectable guess at anything else. You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his trade.

From Here to Eternity (1951), p. 668
Context: Why was it everything was always so goddam complicated? Even the simplest things was so goddam complicated when you come to doing them.

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Source: Black Elk Speaks (1961), Ch. 17 : The First Cure
Context: Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop.

As quoted in The Los Angeles Times (20 April 2003)

Source: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Source: The Hotel New Hampshire

Letter (19 December 1935) as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, (No. 336)