It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.
Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
I thought my wife ought not even to be under suspicion.
Oh, Death was never enemy of ours! We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
I can’t stand real things. If I could put up with reality I wouldn’t be in here.
I love you as one loves certain obscure things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
Religions are poems. They concert our daylight and dreaming mind, our emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture.
Poor blacks hated. Poor whites hated. It was only when blacks got money and whites got money that they mixed.
Love does not occur only in the human soul; it is not simply the attraction we feel toward human beauty: it is a significantly broader phenomenon. It certainly occurs within the animal kingdom, and even in the world of plants. In fact, it occurs everywhere in the universe.
Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
There was nothing worse than having to feel sorry for people who had wronged you. You don't want lottery wins for your enemies, but you don't want tragedies for them either. Then they got the upper hand.
I hope I never have to live in a country where I can’t communicate with my neighbor.
Ye living lamps, by whose dear light The nightingale does sit so late
We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold.
A charming creature, big-eyed and sleek, she bore the name of Beauty—and very appropriately too, it seems, which is not always the case.
Death was a blessing, so great, so deep that we can fathom it only at those moments, like this one now, when we are reprieved from it. It was the return home from long, unspeakably painful wanderings, the correction of a great error, the loosening of tormenting chains, the removal of barriers---it set a horrible accident to rights again.
When all else fails, give up and go to the library.
We've known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There's been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously.
Well, as a general rule, most women, before they’ve got ‘em, present to their men smiling, agreeing faces. They hide their thoughts. You now, when you’re feeling hateful, honey, you are hateful.
I could have wept from the relief of light.
Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element. Music is the only other one that takes place in time.
Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen?
This is how addicts think and behave: they rearrange the furniture of their lives to make room for their bad habits.
That was the secret of a happy marriage: step away from the rage.
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
Every child born in the world must be considered as deriving its existence from God. The world is this new to him as it was to the first that existed, and his natural right in it is of the same kind.
It seemed to me that there was something unnaturally deliberate in the way my daughter uttered those words. Perhaps I imagined it, but then a father comes to notice any small inflections in his daughter's speech.
Even if we are often led to desire through the sense of beauty can you say that the beautiful is what we desire?
Have faith and wait!
God was grumbling his thunder and playing his zig-zag lightning thru his fingers.
Misery and a nameless nostalgic distress possessed him. He was twenty-three, and oh so agonizingly conscious of the fact.
Parwana … keeps walking, the darkness around her like a mother’s womb.
He sought to counsel and soothe the despairing by pointing to the resigned, and to transform the grief which sees only a pit into the grief with sees a star.
Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere.
Gentlemen, if there’s one slogan in this world I believe, it is this: equal rights for all, special privileges for none.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
That is the one weakness that has led me into the most trouble. Trying to be kind to others I often get my soul shredded into a kind of spiritual pasta.
Love is the most unstable, the most unreliable of man’s instincts, the most prone of its very essence to error and fatal perversion.
When I die I want your hands on my eyes.
I want to do to you what spring does with the cherry trees.
Innocence, once lost, is lost forever.
Tell me, is the rose naked or is that her only dress?
Are you not more to me than my own light and life?
Men want women to deceive them because it’ll prove their worst thoughts about women.
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
Had Aylmer reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the happiness which would have woven his mortal life of the selfsame texture with the celestial.
Everybody deserves to have something good in their life. At least once.
I never taught language for the purpose of teaching it; but invariably used language as a medium for the communication of thought; thus the learning of language was coincident with the acquisition of knowledge.
A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will take from you the one thing you cannot bear to lose.