The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give...

Then everyone would retreat for a nap, after which we would have coffee and cake, sometimes an argument.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I recognized him then; that is, I finally comprehended what I had known but had never been able to formulate: he had always been complete. He had finished the work of becoming himself, long before...

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate...

words failed.” But words were not failing us at all. It was not true that there was no way to describe our experience. We had plenty of language to talk to each other about the...

Still, it was fair to say that the minimum requirement for a truly enjoyable existence would be unbridled promiscuity.

All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.

Only gay bars were full; the heterosexual joints were empty—the heteros massively committed to watching television with their falsely monogamous spouses.

If my mind and my city were the same thing then I was losing my mind.

Tell the fucking story.

There’s a psychological mechanism, I’ve come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness...

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn’t like losing at all.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

Isabel’s indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.

the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta-Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite all the abundant...

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough.

One person’s garbage is another person’s commodity.

And the world around me was nothing if not an infinity of distractions: cute girls, novels and comic books, my budding record collection, neighborhood boys whistling from the playground under my window, beckoning me to...

He drunkenly recognized that the lust was part of something bigger, of a craving to pursue pleasure unreasonably, beyond the right and wrong, to go as far as his body took him. In the body...

What is it with boys? How do they slide into fucked-upness so quickly, with such natural ease?

While he wanted to teach me what he knew, I wanted him to see what it all looked like for me—perhaps love is a process of finding a common vision of reality.

One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling, that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation.

There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out–what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly...

Only those who do not care, only those who find a way to diminish or extinguish the value of other human beings, survive wars without damage and speak of warrior honor afterward.

So you are Catholic? Didn’t know that.I am nothing, I said. God knows God is no friend of mine. But I envy people who believe in this crap. They don’t worry about the meaning of...

He who recollects a thing by which he was once pleased desires to possess it in the same circumstances as when he first was pleased by it. He who was never pleased is doomed to...

we wept within the moment that was dividing our life into before and after, whereby the before was forever foreclosed, while the after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle-star, into a dark universe of...

not only did he deplore the waste of words, he detested the moral lassitude with which they were wasted. To him, in whose throat the bone of displacement was forever stuck, it was wrong to...

The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.

The cafeteria in the Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital basement was the saddest place in the world—and forever it shall be—with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse foreboding of those who stepped...

I told her I hated normal people and the land of the fucking free and the home of the asshole brave, and I hated God and George and all and everything.

It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.

When the mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it.