California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.

When along the pavement, Palpitating flames of life, People flicker around me, I forget my bereavement, The gap in the great constellation, The place where a star used to be

When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.

I love you, rotten, Delicious rottenness. ...wonderful are the hellish experiences, Orphic, delicate Dionysos of the Underworld.

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is always towards the other soul.

there is no pornography without a secrecy.

She wished some help would come from outside. But in the whole world there was no help. Society was terrible because it was insane. Civilized society is insane. Money and so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first. The individual asserts himself in his disconnected insanity in these two modes: money and love.