“I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist.”

One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand.

The one thing I know is that if you’re not paying attention, it will come back to bite you.

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.

These guys are really the lowest dogs around, and if people knew the truth about them, they would be held in more contempt than Ben Johnson, the runner, and they’re going to know the truth when I do this book!

All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile-a thing people will say took a little something.

Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.

It’s one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it’s another not to be able to live by what one does know.

If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.

We can’t all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.

There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience.

Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.

In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.

Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.

For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.

Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.

Nationality isn’t soul.

We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.

At any moment, we are either giving humanity the gift of our clarity or our confusion. And that clarity or confusion is affecting the humanity around us, the world around us. It is manifesting. It is taking form.

If you resist confusion,you are always confused. We think that we resist certain states because they are there, but actually they are there because we resist them.

We don’t come to nirvana by avoiding samsara. We don’t come to clarity by avoiding confusion.

The willingness to not bypass illusion is very important. We come to nirvana by way of samsara. We come to see the true nature of things by seeing through the illusory nature of things.

We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

Times of great calamity and confusion have been productive for the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace. The brightest thunder-bolt is elicited from the darkest storm.