“There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.”

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.

I’ve been so unhappy for years, so unhappy, I don’t understand how a human being can be so unhappy all the time and still be alive.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Anything that consoles is fake.

Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.

Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.

Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.

For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.

Time, like the sea, unties all knots.

As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.

One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.

Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Rome has grown since its humble beginnings that it is now overwhelmed by its own greatness.

I’m all over the place with muffins. Carrots are great. Banana, chocolate chip, they rock, too.

Greatness is always built on this foundation: the ability to appear, speak and act, as the most common man.

The great lesson that nature seems to teach us at all ages is self-dependence, self-protection, self-support. In the hours of our keenest sufferings all are thrown wholly on themselves for consolation.

There is nothing man will not attempt when great enterprises hold out the promise of great rewards.

A simple layman armed with Scripture is greater than the mightiest pope without it.

Myself when young did eagerly frequent doctor and saint, and heard great argument about it and about: but evermore came out by the same door as in I went.

We all mourn in our own way. I mourn with a great steak.