“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

I care not if I live but a day and a night, so long as my deeds live after me.

Places remember events.

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light.

Sentimentality is unearned emotion.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

While you have a thing it can be taken from you, but when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. It is yours then forever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.

The pleasures of love lasts but a fleeting but the pledges of life outlusts a lifetime.

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it?

Your battles inspired me – not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.

I am proud to be an emotionalist.

What an old maid I’m getting to be. Lacking the courage to be in love with death!

Of course, in a novel, people’s hearts break, and they die and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.

Every moment of life is the last, every poem is a death poem.

And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.

When I die I have visions of fags singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ and the flag at Fire Island being flown at half mast.

Truth never triumphs-its opponents just die out.

We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

I hear they burn for murder. Well, they say it just takes a second to die.