“A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn’t stink a little bit of the writer’s pride in having given up his pride.”

It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.

He said you were the only one who was bitter about S’s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.

Know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.

I don’t even know what I was running for—I guess I just felt like it.

Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid.

She was not one for emptying her face of expression.

I told her I loved her and all. It was a lie, of course, but the thing is, I meant it when I said it. I’m crazy. I swear to God I am.

I don’t exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.

You’re lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.

It’s not too bad when the sun’s out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.

Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.

That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any.

The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has — I’m not kidding.

I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

A race of people is like and individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.

I like to pride myself on thinking pretty long term, but not that long term.

Damned indecision and cursed pride.

People who pride themselves on their “complexity” and deride others for being “simplistic” should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.

Through your rags I see your vanity.

For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

Some people may call me a nerd. I claim the label with pride.