In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive.

I seem to be the only person in the world who doesn't mind being pitied. If you love me, pity me. The human state is pitiable: born to die, capable of so much, accomplishing so little; killing instead of creating, destroying instead of building, hating instead of loving. Pitiful, pitiful.

The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.