“This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us.”

Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years.

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts or my thoughts the result of my dreams.

There’s lots of good fish in the sea, maybe, but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you’re not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.

When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people.

Man is a mistake. He must go.

Used to all kinds of society, she watched people as one reads the pages of a novel, with a certain disinterested amusement.

Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you’re married and her name’s Bertha.

That’s how women are with me said Paul. They want me like mad but they don’t want to belong to me.

Money poisons you when you’ve got it, and starves you when you haven’t.

You love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And there I will die smothered.

Now go away then, and leave me alone. I don’t want any more of your meretricious persiflage.

They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her.

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.

Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos.

Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

One sheds ones sickness in books- repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them.

You don’t remove the evil in a person by killing the person.

There’s only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.

Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal; and he may be properly charged with evil who refused to learn how he might prevent it.

As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of good and evil?

It’s not the gods But our own hearts We need to fear. The evil starts Against all odds Not there but here.

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil – or else an absolute ignorance.

Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy ‘savages.’ There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there.