Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it’s always there.
Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.
I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.
He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn’t matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.
What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.
Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.
When you give up struggle, there’s a kind of love.
There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won’t receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.
Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.
Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.
The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.
And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.
This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash.
The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.
For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.
Acting is the loneliest profession I know.
Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.
I don’t think that any ‘ism’ is higher than literature or art. So I’m a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work.
Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?
To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.