When you're a child you're the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They're only ghosts furnished for you to talk to.

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

A boy becomes a man when a man is needed

It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be loved without satiety.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

The candle aimed its spark of light at heaven, like an artist who consumes himself to become divine.

A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldn't say you wore a beard because you liked a beard. People didn't like you for telling the truth. You had to say you had a scar so you couldn't shave.