And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.
Don’t you loathe it when doctors use the word ‘we’ when it applies only and solely to yourself?
That was the best of all. To speak the truth and be attended.
Doctors, by God; washing their hands, looking out windows, fiddling with dreadful things while you are stretched out on a table or half undressed on a chair.
Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.
I want – I want – I want – was all that she could think about – but just what this real want was she did not know.
We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart – the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.
The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.
I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.
It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.
But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.
All we can do is go around telling the truth.
But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.
Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.
There are those who know and those who don’t know. And for every ten thousand who don’t know there’s only one who knows. That’s the miracle of all time – the fact that these millions know so much but don’t know this.
There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.
There are all these people here I don’t know by sight or by name. And we pass alongside each other and don’t have any connection. And they don’t know me and I don’t know them. And now I’m leaving town and there are all these people I will never know.
She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.
The world is certainty a sudden place.
To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.