Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.
Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
What good is power when you’re too wise to use it?
Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn’t taking place.
I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after ‘semicolons,’ and another one after ’now.
We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can’t choose where to listen.
If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.
To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.
In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.
There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion.
In war everybody is a prisoner.
At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.
The backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.
What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make; I can only undo, unmake.
Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.
It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.
Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.