“I blundered into writing.”

If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?

That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

In order to travel far you have to be detached.

the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.

…and yet I am what they think I am.

I am nobody but myself.

Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?

Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.

We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.

The prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk – they are all part of the curriculum.

To be matter-of-fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy – and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret.

When big-time blunders occur in any workplace, the boss or bosses usually are at fault, not clerks or secretaries or salespeople.

But what is woman? Only one of nature’s agreeable blunders.

It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.

Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.