“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff’s edge, like Sappho into the sea.

For God’s sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don’t say surgaries, or I’m done.

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets,unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.

If only there weren’t so many other people in the world,’ he said lugubriously.

She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.

That’s the place to get to – nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere.

I am part of the sun as my eye is of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea.

Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

The dead don’t die. They look on and help.

He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society or fear of oneself.

It is a fine thing to establish one’s own religion in one’s heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.

How she hated words, always coming between her and her life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the live-sap out of living things.

The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love.

Every true artist is the salvation of every other. Only artists produce for each other a world that is fit to live in.

They may kill me, but they cannot kill my ideas. They can crush my body, but they will not be able to crush my spirit.

If the deaf are to hear, the sound has to be very loud. When we dropped the bomb, it was not our intention to kill anybody. We have bombed the British Government. The British must quit India and make her free.

Sooner or later the world will have to return to the good old days when we fought wars and killed people the old-fashioned way, one at a time.

I think capital punishment works great. Every killer you kill never kills again.

I believe that whatever doesn’t kill you, simply makes you stronger.

A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that’s what it’s for!

I’m not much for talking. You know what I do. I put guys in body bags when I’m right.

It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hard put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery, but the friction.