“She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.”

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.

One of the most difficult things is life is to continue running your hardest when you don’t know the end point.

Perfection comes from the disinterested performance of an action on a continuous basis.

We must continue to go forward as one people, as brothers and sisters.

I just want to continue the way I am going.

The unexpected has happened so continually in my life that it has ceased to deserve the name.

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.

Society’s future will depend on a continuous improvement program for the human character. And what will that future bring? I do not know, but it will be exciting.

Memories of our lives, of our works and our deeds will continue in others.