The world is violent and mercurial – it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love – love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.
I want to infect you with the tremendous excitement of living, because I believe that you have the strength to bear it.
I will read long books and the journals of dead writers. I will feel closer to them than I ever felt to people I used to know before I withdrew from the world. It will be sweet and cool this friendship of mine with dead poets, for I won’t have to touch them or answer their questions. They will talk to me and not expect me to answer. And I’ll get sleepy listening to their voices explaining the mysteries to me. I’ll fall asleep with the book still in my fingers, and it will rain.
When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.
Princess, the great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have the pleasure in love and those that haven’t and hadn’t any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers.
I’m not good. I don’t know why people have to pretend to be good, nobody’s good.
Sometimes – there’s God – so quickly!
I’ve been accused of having a death wish but I think it’s life that I wish for, terribly, shamelessly, on any terms whatsoever.
To you, whoever you are, when I am gone – remember to be kind tonight to some lonely person. For me.
Well, sooner or later, at some point in your life, the thing that you lived for is lost or abandoned, and then... you die, or find something else.
I want to rest. I want to breathe quietly again.
Chance, you’ve gone past something you couldn’t afford to go past; your time, your youth, you’ve passed it. It’s all you had and you’ve had it.
The human animal is a beast that dies and if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting! – Which it never can be...
It’s no tragedy, Freckles. Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.
When something is Festering on your memory or in your imagination, laws of silence don’t work, it’s just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant...
We mustn’t scream at each other, the walls in this house have ears...
Monsters don’t die early; they hang on long. Awfully long. Their vanity’s infinite, almost as infinite as their disgust with themselves.
If I could just give myself to the steady peace of the rain. That lovely steady peace.
A fragile, unearthly prettiness has come out in Laura: she is like a piece of translucent glass touched by light, given a momentary radiance, not actual, not lasting.
Some people say that science clears up all the mysteries for us. In my opinion it only creates more!