“Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.”

Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.

To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.

Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.

Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.

The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.

My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable.

This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.

…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.

Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual.

A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.

None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future.

To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.

Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.

Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.

Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.

The philosophy behind much advertising is based on the old observation that every man is really two men – the man he is and the man he wants to be.

Every social injustice is not only cruel, but it is economic waste.

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing.

When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.

I came home every Friday afternoon, riding the six miles on the back of a big mule. I spent Saturday and Sunday washing and ironing and cooking for the children and went back to my country school on Sunday afternoon.

The ideal woman which is in every man’s mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist, her hand.

I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o’clock every day.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.