“To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.”

Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.

Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.

The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.

It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won’t be for another thousand years?

We’d get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.

Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.

A fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he’s already got. He’ll cling to trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk a change.

It’s impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky’ is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home.

There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be.