I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.

What is better than to sit at the end of the day and drink wine with friends, or substitutes for friends?

Read your own obituary notice; they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.

I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.

What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.

For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul, or hers.