Wait until you're afraid of living ten years alone with no companion and a nursing home at the end of it. Then you'll start running in any direction, even away from that girl in the red dressing-gown, to find someone, any one,who will last until you are through.
His existence no more entered their vision than the air itself. His appearance caused no more ripple of unrest than a drop of water in the Japan Sea.
The first act of the life's tragedy begins the moment we form a parent-child relationship.
One starts promiscuous and ends like one's grandfather, faithful to one woman.
Like a sleepwalker, like a robot, I felt as if its words had begun to control my muscles.
Life is an Olympic Game hosted by a group of lunatics.
I’m sorry to tell you that we are now completely fed up with life and that we all want to die immediately. Just by thinking that the pleasure of dying is a privilege of the living, we thank our ancestors, or rather, their enlightenment based on the rationalist spirit…
The wish to become a writer is simply egoism: the desire to become a puppet master and thus separate oneself from other puppets
Darkness, when once it fell, fell like a stone.
We are no longer limited by ignorance and lack of purpose; but our ignorance is still enormous. The road we have to travel still stretches into the distance. It is impossible for me to explain the nature of the problems that confront us. If human beings were capable of understanding, there would be no need to explain.
Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift.
Life is more hellish than hell.
Sometimes we have a kind of love for our enemies and sometimes we feel hate for our friends.
And a Christmas without punch is sinking a hole to bedrock with nary a pay streak.
Unfortunately for Him, God cannot commit suicide like we can.
Find me an uncomplicated child, Pyle. When we are young we are a jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older.
She was a pleasing and wholesome sight, and he was immediately drawn to her. Her beauty was not so extraordinary, yet what he felt then was somehow more exquisite, more disturbing, than anything he felt before on seeing some attractive woman in passing. Like an adolescent with awakening passions he quickly looked away, made almost breathless by the acute happiness that came over him.
When my breast grew cold, everything was as silent as the dead in their graves. What profound silence! Not a single bird-note was heard in the sky over this grave in the hollow of the mountains.
And in two centuries, human history became a parable of the weakness of human beings, the indifference of nature, the helplessness of man confronting Necessity.
I have a feeling that there are powerful forces working on the side of humanity, although I have no idea of their nature.
Life is like a box of matches: it is silly to treat it seriously but it is dangerous not to treat it seriously.
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.
Yet so enormous is man's optimism and power of self-renewal that the chaos only stimulates him to new efforts.
Toshihito smiled. It was the sort of smile that a child who has done mischief gives his parent when he has nearly been found out. It seemed as if the wrinkles at the tip of his nose and the slack muscles at the corners of his eyes were deciding whether or not to burst into laughter.
She's no child. She's tougher than you'll ever be. Do you know the kind of polish that doesn't take scratches? That's Phuong. She can survive a, dozen of us. She'll get old, that's all. She'll suffer from childbirth and hunger and cold and rheumatism, but she'll never suffer like we do from thoughts, obsessions-she won't scratch, she'll only decay.
Time has its revenges, but revenges seem so often sour.
Everyone knew vice was bad for any real revolutionary climate.
Moonlight reminds me of a mortuary and the cold wash of an unshaded globe over a marble slab, but starlight is alive and never still, it is almost as though someone in names of the stars are friendly. Venus is any woman we love, the Bears are the bears of childhood, and I suppose the Southern Cross, to those, like my wife, who believe, may be a favourite hymn or a prayer beside the bed.
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.
Ever again to breathe pure happiness,
So happy that we gave away our toy?
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.
My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action—even an opinion is a kind of action.
I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin.
Our stories. We store them where moth and rust destroy.
Man is an animal who is trying to evolve into a god.
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.
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.