“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.”

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.

We fucked a flame into being.

You’re always begging things to love you, he said, as if you were a beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them–

What liars poets and everybody were! They made one think one wanted sentiment. When what one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality.

One could laugh at the world better if it didn’t mix tender kindliness with its brutality.

The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I’ll do my best. But you’re right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.

There is no pornography without a secrecy.

Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.

Nobody knows you. You don’t know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings?

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.