“The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.”

When I was fourteen, my father decided to initiate me into the ways of manhood, and took me to the local whorehouse.

We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. –Blanche Dubois

They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at – Elysian Fields!

Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.

It is, perhaps more than anything else, the arrest of time which has taken place in a completed work of art that gives certain plays their feeling of depth and significance.

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.

If you can’t be yourself, what’s the point of being anyone else?

Marriage is an economic arrangement in many ways, let’s face it.

I’m not living with you. We occupy the same cage. (Maggie)

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

This is so simple I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m sure it’s true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that’s why I don’t understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in.

I gave up visiting my psychoanalyst because he was meddling too much in my private life.

Maggie, we’re through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.

I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency.

Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.

I want to point the way to something that should forever lure them, when the TV set is broken and the movie is over and the school bell has rung for the last time.

The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. Where tile catching the light (ting! Ting!)” (p. 3).

In search of some rest, in search of a break From a life of tests where something’s always at stake Where something’s always so far What about my broken car?

I’ve fallen down crevasses, been bitten by snakes, been knocked unconscious, had various limbs broken and once, a heavy camera came plunging down which very nearly decapitated me.

Only in the shattering can the rebuilding occur

And there was a real shedding of the old dogma, like boundaries of morality were being broken down and everybody was into the new party mode of just loving on each other. Which destroyed thousands of us. I lost 16 of my personal friends through that lifestyle.

Pain nourishes courage. You can’t be brave if you’ve only had wonderful things happen to you.

There are various ways of mending a broken heart, but perhaps going to a learned conference is one of the more unusual.