George Washington chopped down the tree, and then he threw away the money. Do you understand? He was telling us an essential truth. Namely, that money doesn’t grow on trees. This is what made our country great, Peter. Now George Washington’s picture is on every dollar bill. There is an important lesson to be learned from all this.
I’ve made my nothing, and now I’ve got to live in it.
The best thing about being fifteen is that you don’t have to be fifteen for more than a year.
Everything solid for a time, and then the sun comes up one morning and the world begins to melt.
Our lives are no more than the sum of manifold contingencies, and no matter how diverse they might be in their details, they all share an essential randomness in their design: this then that, and because of that, this.
He already understand that the world consisted of two realms, the visible and the invisible, and that the things he couldn’t see were often more real than the things he could.
The grinding search for money can crush the spirit out of you unless you’re made of steel.
Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within.
No one can ever amount to anything in this life without someone else to believe in him.
I’m an intelligent pessimist, a pessimist who has occasional flashes of optimism. Nearly everything happens for the worst, but not always, you see, nothing is ever always, but i’m always expecting the worst, and when the worst doesn’t happen, I get so excited I begin to sound like an optimist.
You were too young back then to understand how much you would later forget – and too locked in the present to realize that the person you were writing to was in fact your future self. So you put down the journal, and little by little, over the course of the next forty-seven years, almost everything was lost.
All this belongs to the language of ghosts. There are many other possible kinds of talks in this language. Most of them begin when one person says to another: I wish. What they wish for might be anything at all, as long as it is something that cannot happen. I wish the sun would never set. I wish money would grow in my pockets. I wish the city would be like it was in the old days. You get the idea.
If you do not consider the man before you to be human, there are few restraints of conscience on your behavior towards him.
I wasn’t able to think about them directly or summon them up in any conscious way, but as I put together their puzzles and played with their Lego pieces, building evermore complex and baroque structures, I felt that I was temporarily inhabiting them again – carrying on their little phantom lives for them by repeating the gestures they had made when they still had bodies.
I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand.
Everything is connected to everything else, every story overlaps with every other story.
For the fact is that it takes a great deal of self-confidence for a person to poke fun at himself, and a person with that kind of self-confidence is rarely a fool or a bungler.
The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.
At fifty-seven, I felt old. Now, at seventy-four, I feel much younger than I did then.
One of the odd things about being himself... was that there seemed to be several of him, that he wasn’t just one person but a collection of contradictory selves, and each time he was with a different person, he himself was different as well.