“Their words were only accidents in the mutual silence.”

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.

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

Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.

Perhaps only those people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the world.

Give up bearing children and bear hope and love and devotion to those already born.

We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

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.

He felt he had lost it for good, he knew what it was to have been in communication with her, and to be cast off again. In misery, his heart like a heavy stone, he went about unliving.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself

If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down.

Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.

Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.

Death is less bitter punishment than death’s delay.

If all you can do is judge a person by their appearance because you don’t have the spirit to judge someone from within, you’re in trouble.

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

Greatness and madness are next door neighbors and they often borrow each other’s sugar.

You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.

At the end of the day, whether or not those people are comfortable with how you’re living your life doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you’re comfortable with it.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.