We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.

There's something evil in me that loves evil and degradation--purity's black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar's door?

I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravished

For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.

Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.

One cup poured into another makes different waters; tears shed by one eye would blind if wept into another's eye. The breast we strike in joy is not the breast we strike in pain; any man's smile would be consternation on another's mouth.

A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.