“So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.”

What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.

I’ve been so unhappy for years, so unhappy, I don’t understand how a human being can be so unhappy all the time and still be alive.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Anything that consoles is fake.

Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.

Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.

Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.

For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.

Time, like the sea, unties all knots.

As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.

When a man begins to feel that he is the only one who can lead in this republic, he is guilty of treason to the spirit of our institutions.

The only way you can become a legend is in your coffin

The death of one is a tragedy, but death of a million is just a statistic.

Before a man dies, hold back and call him not happy but lucky.

Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks.

Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.

I’d marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me, and guarantee that he’d be dead within a year.

Treason seldom dwells with courage.