my mother, poor fish, wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile! why don't you ever smile?" and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw

The masses are always wrong...Wisdom is doing everything the crowd does not do. All you do is reverse the totality of their learning and you have the heaven they're looking for.

Gradually I came to realize that my understanding of women goes only as far as the pleasure is concerned.

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

Potential," I said, "doesn't mean a thing. You've got to do it. Almost every baby in a crib has more potential than I have.

there is a place in the heart that will never be filled a space and even during the best moments and the greatest times times we will know it we will know it more than ever there is a place in the heart that will never be filled and we will wait and wait in that space.

One more drink and you're dead. This is no way to talk to a suicide head.