“Those who build walls are their own prisoners.”

And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.

What good is music? None … and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘

We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people .

While we read a novel, we are insane-bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices… Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.

What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it.

The light is the left hand of darkness.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

First sentences are doors to worlds.

No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this:

By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

Apparently, an undocumented side effect of dope is a gross overestimation of one’s own intelligence.

What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.

To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.

The loftiest in status are those who do not know their own status.

I don’t compete with other discus throwers. I compete with my own history.

And the most virtuous of them are those who do not know their own virtue.

My own celebrity, my own life. This is semi-autobiographical in terms of my commitment to this kind of thing.

They somehow didn’t see the need for an accordion player. That’s when I realized that I had to find my own path in life.