“We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.”

Nothing annoys me more than having the most trivial action analyzed and explained.

Look closer and you’ll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed.

I take a sun bath and listen to the hours, formulating, and disintegrating under the pines, and smell the resiny hardihood of the high noon hours. The world is lost in a blue haze of distances, and the immediate sleeps in a thin and finite sun.

And only weaklings who lack courage and the power to feel they’re right when the whole world says they’re wrong, ever lose.

A vacuum can only exist, I imagine, by the things which enclose it.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

I play the radio and moon about…and dream of Utopias where its always July the 24th 1935, in the middle of summer forever.

Memories should be sharp when one has nothing else to live for.

Women sometimes seem to share a quiet, unalterable dogma of persecution that endows even the most sophisticated of them with the inarticulate poignancy of the peasant.

They hadn’t much faith in travel, nor a great belief in a change of scene as a panacea for spiritual ills; they were simply glad to be going.

By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future.

Anything incomprehensible has a sexual significance to many people under thirty-five.

She quietly expected great things to happen to her, and no doubt that’s one of the reasons why they did.

It’s terrible to allow conventional habits to gain a hold on a whole household; to eat, sleep and live by clock ticks.

Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell of dying moons and shadows.

Why is there happiness and comfort and excitement where you are and no where else in the world.

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is – infinite.

Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.

The corruption of religions comes from turning them to mere words and appearances.

To look back is to relax one’s vigil.

The greatest lesson I learned that year in Mrs. Henry’s class was the lesson Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to teach us all: Never judge people by the color of their skin. God makes each of us unique in ways that go much deeper.

Technicolor makes me look like death warmed over.

I love myself when I am laughing. And then again when I am looking mean and impressive.

You cannot look at a person and tell whether they’re good or bad.