In spite of much that could be ventured to the contrary it would seem overwhelmingly certain that any fulness of the good which human existence is capable of must come in a clarity and health of brain and of feeling, of self-knowledge and of knowledge of the world, as well as in any clarity of physical action: and could be arrived at only through education or self-education, using those words in senses much broader than their common ones.
Everyone knew vice was bad for any real revolutionary climate.
It’s a dangerous feeling getting noticed, being wanted. Getting seen deep and proper, it’s shit hot but terrible too. It’s like being took over. And your whole skin hurts like you suddenly grew two sizes in a minute.
My heart is broken. It’s turned to a piece of stone. I’m no good. That’s what’s as bad as anything, that I’m no good anymore.
If you could fly you’d want to do something else, like swim.
He of the Otter Skins drew over to the stove as do men who have been deprived of fire and are afraid the Promethean gift may vanish at any moment.
Rachel says that love is like a big black piano being pushed off the top of a three-story building and you’re waiting on the bottom to catch it. But Lourdes says it’s not that way at all. It’s like a top, like all the colors in the world are spinning so fast they’re not colors anymore and all that’s left is a white hum.
A single traumatic experience in childhood could be the foundation for a lifelong neurosis. One or two happy experiences in early childhood can make a man an optimist for life.
As an unashamed 'romantic', I have always been subject to boredom. This boredom arises out of a kind of mistrust of the world. You feel you can't ignore it, can't take your eyes off it and forget it.
And it is quite as fair to observe that ignorance and slovenliness and the tradition itself are the inevitable products of just one thing: poverty.
To see him working on a digging was to see a man who had ceased to exist in the twentieth century, and who looked down on history like a golden eagle from some mountain peak.
Well, it takes some courage to be a murderer too, you know.
She seemed, anyhow, all light, glowing, like some bird or air ball that has flown in, attached itself for a moment to a bramble.
And Xander’s kiss, my first real kiss, makes me press my lips together, try to taste it again.
Is falling in love with someone’s story the same thing as falling in love with the person himself?
A sane man is a man who is fully awake. As he grows tired, he loses his ability to rise above dreams and delusions, and life becomes steadily more chaotic.
Our stories. We store them where moth and rust destroy.
See, a dog knows how to wait. Dogs are good at that. Only because half the time a mutt doesn’t even know it’s waiting.
Sabina could not understand why the dead would want to have imitation palaces built over them. The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone.
Man is an animal who is trying to evolve into a god.
She missed him the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about the sun when it was shining.
The new man has lost faith in life, he has lost faith in knowledge.
I was like some diver at the bottom of the sea, so absorbed in contemplating the treasure of a sunken ship that I failed to notice the cold eyes of the octopus that lay in wait behind me.
She is always sad like a house on fire - always something wrong.
It was good to have people hate you—it kept you sharp.
Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.
For, whereas, spring's couriers were once the evidence of our finer senses, now the Associated Press does the trick.
If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross.
Her sorrow drags me down like a vengeful current.
I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content.
Her dad’s body is a castle for her. A shelter and a weapon. When he puts his arm around her shoulders she feels a mixture of terror and comfort.
The strange thing about your smile is that it has never once become less real or less intense. It is a smile caught from a moment in a still photograph, now extended into an indefinitely long moving film.
You shouldn’t have isolated any of us unless your purpose was to drive us insane. You almost succeeded with me more than once. Humans need one another.
Then he began running away—until he realized there was no "away."
Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
The goals we pursue are always veiled.
Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.
Once man has a purpose and a belief, he is almost invincible.
This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing.
But I suspect that God is what you do, not what or who you believe in.
And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t.
They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger.
There was something venomous and snakelike in the boy's black eyes. They burned like cold fire, as with a vast, concentrated bitterness.
The worst part of Leon’s fury was the way he whispered, this terrible tortured hissing from his mouth, giving his words a tone more deadly than a shout or a yell.
He felt helplessly weak, the kind of weakness that came with illness, with grief.
Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal.
No one should die alone.
Sometimes it’s a mighty struggle to know what’s real and what’s just . . . a mirage.
He is all for double lives, triple lives, lives lived in compartments.