People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

Anyhow, I had found something out about an unknown privation, and I realized how a general love or craving, before it is explicit or before it sees its object, manifests itself as boredom or some...

Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there’s the devil to pay.

O Lord! he concluded, forgive all these trespasses. Lead me not into Penn Station.

Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.

I am not an ornithologist—I am a bird.

If you could have confidence in nature you would not have to fear. It would keep you up. Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man...

Your authority and my degeneracy are one in the same.

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few.

With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don’t cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don’t poison everything…

He knew what retributions your devils are liable to bring for the way you treat your wife and women or behave while your father is on his deathbed, what you ought to think of your...

You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.

Many common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the harmony of the moment.

Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better with myself. For all the time I have wasted I am very sorry. Let me out of...

It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn’t have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts....

A man may say, “From now on I’m going to speak the truth.” But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he’s even done speaking.

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

Some people embrace their gifts with gratitude. Others have no use for them and can think only of overcoming their weaknesses. Only their defects interest and challenge them. Thus those who hate people may seek...

People don’t realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.

All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it...

A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him.

The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether.

The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which...

The more you love people the more they’ll mix you up.

Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don’t know what insect it was, but it was brown, shining, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of...

I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its thrilling...

New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn’t come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.

Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.

In the history of the world many souls have been, are, and will be, and with a little reflection this is marvelous and not depressing. Many jerks are made gloomy about it, for they think...

That’s the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what’s real

The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.

I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again, the eternal punishments of Hell will have to regain their...

I see that I’ve become a really bad correspondent. It’s not that I don’t think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you...

Maybe America didn’t need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we.

…between human beings there are only two alternatives, either brotherhood or crime.

At times I feel like a socket that remembers its tooth.

Brother raises a hand against brother and son against father (how terrible!) and the father also against son. And moreover it is a continuity-matter, for if the father did not strike the son, they would...

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

What this means is not a single Tower of Babel plotted in common, but hundreds of thousands of separate beginnings, the length and breadth of America. Energetic people who build against pains and uncertainties, as...

In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don’t mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek...

Shall I run back into the desert … and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the...

A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was...

There is no limit to the amount of intelligence invested in ignorance when the need for illusion runs deep.

I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful...

He didn’t ask “Where will you spend eternity?” as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, “With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?

Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That’s the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real–the here-and-now. Seize the day.

Charlie, you know where I am, don’t you? All right, Charlie, this isn’t literature. This is life.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

Boredom is the conviction that you can’t change … the shriek of unused capacities.