“People or stars Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.”

The hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted and spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly-managed past.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.

Eternity bores me, I never wanted it.

Intoxicated with madness, I’m in love with my sadness.

Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.

I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.

The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out.

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists.

I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.

Love life day by day, color by color, touch by touch.

I am dead to them, even though I once flowered.

I find that in a novel I can get more of life, perhaps not such intense life, but certainly more of life than in poetry.

A disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.

A disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.

Life has its pains and evils-its bitter disappointments; but like a good novel and in healthful length of days, there is infinite joy in seeing the World, the most interesting of continued stories, unfold.

The music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.

Strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities.

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment.

Your ability to face setbacks and disappointments without giving up will be the measure of your ability to succeed.

You will find as the children grow up that as a rule children are a bitter disappointment – their greatest object being to do precisely what their parents do not wish and have anxiously tried to prevent.