“It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.”

“It is of first-rate importance to notice from the start that stupidity is not the same thing, or the same sort of thing, as ignorance. There is no incompatibility between being well-informed and being silly, and a person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts.”

“Grandfather, when you saw the tiger were you scared? Bad people scare me, not tigers.
Grandfather, have you ever run into bad people?
There aren’t many tigers but lots of bad people, only you can’t shoot people.”

“As smoking is to the lungs, so is resentment to the soul; even one puff is bad for you.”

“It is the smell of the stockyards, all of it taken together, a smell so bad one must go down to visit the killing of the animals or never eat meat again. Watching the animals be slaughtered, one knows the human case — no matter how close to angel we may come, the butcher is equally there.”

“Whatever tears one may shed, in the end one always blows one's nose.”

“You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.”

“I think pot should be legal. I don’t smoke it, but I like the smell of it.”

“She was disappearing a little more each day, so thin, so frail, a wisp of smoke. One day she would surely vanish altogether, and there was no way to stop her.”

“It is not my intention to denounce modern education. If it is bad, it may be said that all education is bad which is not self-education, and quite a lot of self-education is going on today — some of it in our schools, under the very noses of the teachers!”