It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.
The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can’t take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.
What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.
Trouble with mice is you always kill ’em.
Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.
When you’re a child you’re the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They’re only ghosts furnished for you to talk to.
Riches seem to come to the poor in spirit, the poor in interest and joy. To put it straight – the very rich are a poor bunch of bastards.
Why don’t you go on west to California? There’s work there, and it never gets cold. Why, you can reach out anywhere and pick an orange. Why, there’s always some kind of crop to work in. Why don’t you go there?
Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.
When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.
And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.
This was an evil beyond thinking. The killing of a man was not so evil as the killing of a boat. For a boat does not have sons, and a boat cannot protect itself, and a wounded boat does not heal.
In nature two things do not occur-the wheel and good taste.
There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward.
I think there must have been some other girl printed somewhere in his heart, for he was a man of love and his wife was not a woman to show her feelings.
Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn’t do anything about it.
In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.
He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.
Maybe – maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure – never sure of her because you aren’t sure of yourself?
Death was a friend, and sleep was Death’s brother.