She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.

That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.

Smoking is the only honorable form of suicide.

Teaching, may I say, is the noblest profession of all in a democracy.

The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.

love is a hawk with velvet claws love is a rock with heart and veins love is a lion with satin jaws love is a storm with silken reins