To taste it once is to taste it forever – life or death. Whichever way the coin flips is right, so long as you hold no stakes.
And inevitably there always crept into our discussions the figure of Whitman, that one lone figure which America has produced in the course of her brief life. In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said.
Perhaps it was the fact of having no father that pushed him along the road toward the discovery of the self, which is the final process of identification with the world and the realization consequently of the uselessness of ties.
Why do lovely faces haunt us so? Do extraordinary flowers have evil roots?
Heroism and obscenity appear no more important in the life of the universe than the fighting or mating of a pair of insects in the woods. All is on the same plane.
I want to flee toward a perpetual dawn with a swiftness and relentlessness that leaves no room for remorse, regret, or repentance. I want to outstrip the inventive man who is a curse to the earth in order to stand once again before an impassable deep which not even the strongest wings will enable me to traverse.
Men are lonely and out of communication with one another because all their inventions speak only of death. Death is the automaton which rules the world of activity. Death is silent, because it has no mouth. Death has never expressed anything. Death is wonderful too – after life.
The secret to a happy life is having lots of interests. Interests are ammunition against despair.
In my mind I saw my own temples in ruins, before even one brick had been laid upon another.
A simple phrase may record a year’s struggle.
We ought to remind ourselves daily, repeat it like a litany, that in our being lies concealed the whole gamut of existence... Above all, we should cease postponing the act of becoming what in fact and essence we are.
We came together in a dance of death and so quickly was I sucked down into the vortex that when I came to the surface again I couldn’t recognize the world. When I found myself loose the music had ceased; the carnival was over and I had been picked clean.
You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual.
Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show.
Art consists in going the full length. If you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT.
In the egocentric prism the helpless victim is walled in by the very light which he refracts. The ego dies in its own glass cage...
There is no fundamental, unalterable difference between things: all is flux, all is perishable. The surface of your being is constantly crumbling; within however you grow hard as a diamond. And perhaps it is this hard, magnetic core inside you which attracts others to you willy-nilly.
The ten-o’ clock breakfasters began to appear: nervous, little men, morose, preoccupied, who wiped their plates with crusts of bread; rude, massive women who, like primitive idols dug out of the soil, had grown rotten in the years; flowery dandies with repulsive faces, reminding him uncomfortably of illustrations in medical tracts.
Twilight hour. Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening and liquescent.
This isn’t the place to complain about the punctilio of prison regimes. I know that they have to take every precaution. All I wish to convey is the effect which this individual had upon me. Months have passed since the incident and yet I can’t forget his face, his manner, his whole being. He’s a man, and I say it calmly and soberly, whom I could kill in cold blood. I could shoot him down in the dark and go quietly about my business, as if I had just brushed a mosquito off my arm.