Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education. She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.

Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?

profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

I don't know what anybody else in the world would want to thank America for, but man, it [jazz] works. What I like about it - and what public health people ought to like about it - it's safe sex.

It posed the question posed by all such stone piles.: how had puny men moved stones so big? And, like all such stone piles, it answered the question itself. Dumb terror had moved those stones so big

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibilty of lying about it