I wish we had all been born birds instead.

I don't reveal to her that I love her. I keep poker faced. She might as well be looking at a cantaloupe, there is so little information in my face, but my heart is beating.

...this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate.

Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.

What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets.