Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

He doesn’t blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in...

They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.

The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug it as it were to one side does self-consciousness dissolve and...

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay your price.

Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic...

I don’t think about politics,” Rabbit says. “That’s one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics.

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.

My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation...

But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it.

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t—whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe

…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men […] In the hush his...

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

The fucking world is running out of gas.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?

As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the...

No act is so private it does not seek applause.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.

There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.

Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. There...

TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn’t interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don’t get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no...

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you’re 15, you tend to never lose it.

Growth is betrayal.

Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all...

The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high...

Writing … is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable...

The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

Chaos is God’s body. Order is the Devil’s chains.

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.

Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said. Know Thyself. Now what does this mean, boys and girls? It means, be what you are. Don’t try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door;...

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn’t had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a...

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

Driving is boring,” Rabbit pontificates, “but it’s what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.

People go around mourning the death of God; it’s the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren’t people any more, they’re just ssoul-less sheep.

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on...

The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

Oh,’ she says, ‘the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It’s a woman who changed her mind afterward.