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

I am part of the sun as my eye is of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea.

Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

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.

Literature is my Utopia

For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It’s not the most social pastime.

I am a book of snow, a spacious hand, an open meadow, a circle that waits, I belong to the earth and its winter.

I love comic books. I just do.

I love comic books. I just do.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.

I’ve spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.