It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.

Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.

How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?

If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.