We are a singularity that makes music out of noise because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

People have been bred to hate for generations — eons, maybe. Some fundamental urge. Something implicit in the human condition.

Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they’re a...

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your...

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines...

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

To hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity, and humans are creatures who spend their lives trying to convince themselves that their existence is not absurd.

That’s a compliment for anyone who knows the freedom and clarity of losing their mind,” he reaffirmed her.

I looked at her, with her hair spilled out on the pillows and the warmth of her body warming mine. And I thought, god-dang, if this ain’t a heck of a way to be in...

She starts to cry. ‘It’s just so terrible,’ she says.’Which part?,’ I ask.’Being human.

Human spirit needs music. Music nourish the soul to survive life’s trauma.

There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find

Living the good life as created beings depends on living within the limits and according to the truths of the human condition. Purity of heart and the capacity to channel desires toward personal self-mastery in...

I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of...

…children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody....

In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace of authentic spirituality is usurped by the divisive politics of religious organizations, and when broken hearts bleed pain in...

My mind didn’t clear. It had been clear before. Instead it muddled, suddenly ablaze with rioting factions of insecurities and dreams, a cacophonous battleground of conflicting moral codes and dogma. I was, therefore, back to...

Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.

I wasn’t sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren’t fools, they just didn’t fit into the needed machinery of the moment....

Struggle strengthens the human bond and lightens the burden of the human condition.

[On Schopenhauer in Black and White] Schopenhauer’s views of love are flawed. Love can’t be merely an illusion of the mind to aid in procreation, but the path to redemption for an otherwise violently selfish...

But even if I know what governs their trajectory, if I know the rules of the movement of things and how things are organized and how certain mutations, transformations, gestations take place, even if I...

We are, perhaps uniquely among the earth’s creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take the idea of dying, unable to sit still.

[At the scene of a murder]The cats’ bloodthirst was normal; it was the way God had made them. They were hunters, they killed for food and to train their young–well maybe sometimes for sport. But...

A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to...

Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.

It is quite possible–overwhelmingly probable, one might guess–that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology

People of religious distinction maintain that human beings exclusively possess souls, on the strength of which they may gain admittance to heaven.Only human beings lie, devise pogroms, murder for recreation, steal, libel, slander and perform...

We represent the true human condition, the one permanent victory over cruelty and chaos. . . . Our true home is the imagination, and our kingdom is the wide-open world.

The Internet is the Petri dish of humanity. We can’t control what grows in it, but we don’t have to watch either.

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a...

Sola la opresión debe temer al pleno ejercicio de la libertad.

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice.God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to...

We writers constantly try to build up our own confidence by getting published, making sales, winning prizes, joining cliques or proclaiming theories. The passion to write constantly strips this vanity aside and forces us to...

What is peace? Balance three iron skewers tip to tip, one upon the other; at the summit, emplace an egg, so that it too poises static in mid-air, and there you have the condition of...

Even within perfection, there are flaws. These flaws carry an unattainable beauty, which is indifferent to the human nature.

It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

The public library contains multitudes. And each person who visits contains multitudes as well. Each of us is a library of thoughts, memories, experiences, and odors. We adapt to one another to produce the human...

Only a spirit of artistic sincerity can console the souls of humankind.

To acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition.

Only tyranny fears the full expression of liberty.

womens’ issues.” Likewise, in fantasy, the imprimatur of a dude somehow makes stuff like romance, relationship drama, introspection, and adorable animal companions magically not girly after all.In a sense, we male fantasists are allowed to...