“The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.”

As we all know, too much of any divine thing is destruction

You’re spending your life without renewing it. You’ve got to be amused, properly healthily amused. You’re spending your vitality without making any. Can’t go on you know. Depression! Avoid depression!

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everyone.

What one does in one’s art, that is the breath of one’s being. What one does in one’s life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.

When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos.

You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.

She would have thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the shame died.

I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.

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

A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board

But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage -it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings.It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.

Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Only youth has a taste of immortality.

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

It makes me sad when I see artists who come alive when they go onstage, because, gee, I really come alive when I’m home.

To be alive is to be broken; to be broken is to stand in need of grace.

And perhaps the greatest paradox of all is how we stand here, fully wounded yet never more alive.

The things that made me feel dead, made me feel alive again.

And I am still alive-what though, my damnation is eternal. A man who deliberately mutilates himself is truly damned, is he not? I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am.

As long as you are alive, you will either live to accomplish your own goals and dreams or be used as a resource to accomplish someone else’s.

You made my non-existent perfect fall apart and unfold gently in the arms of your pure acceptance. Imperfections that became alive, then anything that’s ever been known as beautiful.

Hatred’s the fuel that keeps me alive.