The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.

Anything that consoles is fake.

A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.