Quotes from Carlos Baker

We're kicking our way into adolescence from the minute we're born. Gradually you form your own ideas of how you should lead your life. It's strange, but when you get hurt - really hurt, I mean - you're willing to throw those ideas aside for another set that now make sense to you and calm your hurt.

Anyone who had died young after a happy childhood had won a great victory, since he would be forever spared the discovery of what sort of place the world really is. Others must look forward to death by defeat - their bodies gone, their world destroyed.

But the past, he concluded, was as dead as a smashed Victrola record. "Chasing yesterdays," said he, "is a bum show".

People were not peaches. Like guns and saddles, they were all the better for becoming slightly worn.