“A novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he could find in life itself.”

Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.

Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.

When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day’s occupation that is known as the cocktail hour.

One may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification.

This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affectations glow and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn.

Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows.

You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.

The water of life was given to us to make us see for a while that we are more nearly men and women, more nearly kind and gentle and generous, pleasanter and stronger than without its vision there is any evidence we are.

The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.

The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.

The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost or, if lost, then not altogether in vain.

The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different psychological organization. . . . A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.

When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day’s occupation that is known as the cocktail hour. It marks the lifeward turn.

The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.

The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.

New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end. . . .

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.

You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.

There is less harm to be suffered in being mad among madmen than in being sane all by oneself.

Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.

I discuss with myself questions of politics, love, taste, or philosophy. I let my mind rove wantonly, give it free rein to followany idea, wise or mad that may present itself. My ideas are my harlots.

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.

The whole notion of sanity may be an attempt to medicalize morality – to speak of the good in the language of health: to make us more accurate, more scientific in our wanting – but by the same token it becomes a form of moral blackmail.

You, mad to expect repentance,Tear your robe all you want;I will never repent!