People go around mourning the death of God; it’s the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren’t people any more, they’re just ssoul-less sheep.
It’s not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.
We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
If you’re telling me I’m not mature, that’s one thing I don’t cry over since as far as I can make out it’s the same thing as being dead.
Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth’s many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.
Chaos is God’s body. Order is the Devil’s chains.
My mother didn’t raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?
A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.