Everyone knew vice was bad for any real revolutionary climate.
Maybe that's one of the ways you recognize really lonely people . . . they can always think of something neat to do on rainy days. You can always call them up. They're always home. Fucking always.
But the mind, that perverse monkey--the mind can conceive of anything and seems to take a perverse delight in doing so.
When all else fails, give up and go to the library.
He drank his coffee and watched the Silex bubble and steam, and he wept. The weeping was very calm and completely silent. It and his cup of coffee ended at the same time.
He was suddenly overwhelmed with despair, black and awful.
This is how addicts think and behave: they rearrange the furniture of their lives to make room for their bad habits.
If you want something done right in this world, you have to do it yourself.
Stupidity is one of the two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances.
A cowardly leader is the most dangerous of men.
He who hesitates is usually failed.
How long had it been since he had had a real laugh, an honest one, the kind that comes freely and helplessly from the deepest root of the stomach?
Writing is a lonely job.
We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.
He regarded the peace longingly, the way a man in the desert regards water.
Time did not stand still. In some ways it would have been better if it had. Then there at least would have been an end to hope.
No ties now, and certainly no morality. How could morality be an issue to a man cut loose and drifting?
I understand what it is to die, I think. Now I do, anyway. Not death itself, I still can't comprehend that. But dying. If I stop walking, I'll come to an end.
THE WORLD had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.
She thought about how time had a way of swinging the balance of power on its axis, and how old age had a way of sometimes looking through a dressing-table mirror like the hand of a corpse poking through eroded earth.