“Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.”

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

I blundered into writing.

That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?

That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

In order to travel far you have to be detached.

the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.

…and yet I am what they think I am.

I am nobody but myself.

Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?

Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

There is no love affair held in these hands. I am reminded of this time and again.

Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

I wonder if it’s possible to have a love affair that lasts forever.

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection, fears, doubts, all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.

Whenever fortune wishes to joke, she lifts people from what is humble to the highest extremity of affairs.

In public affairs men are often better pleased that the truth, though known to everybody, should be wrapped up under a decent cover than if it were exposed in open daylight to the eyes of all the world.