“Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.”

If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.

The nonconformist here may be “beat down” by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind.

The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible

The face of evil is always the face of total need.

Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.

Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.

I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.

The simplest questions are the most difficult.

I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.

I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

I’m creating an imaginary — it’s always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.

What a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. Hopeless rubbish.

As soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.

Sometimes, she realizes suddenly, it is simply a matter of blind faith.

Competition between women is good only if it does not prevail; that is to say if it coexists with affinity, affection, with a real sense of being mutually indispensable, with sudden peaks of solidarity in spite of envy, jealousy and the whole inevitable cohort of bad feelings.

A mien which seems to say, “You are looking at somebody now.” For this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

Once Michael gets up there he says, ‘Well, maybe I’ll just hang up here in the air for a while, just sit back.’ Then all of a sudden, he says, ‘Well, maybe I’ll 360.

The world is certainty a sudden place.

Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.

I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.