I think people love each other a little more than they hate each other ... Love has a slim hold on the human corporation, like fifty-one per cent, but it's enough.

We are nothing but a string of gut on a stick of bone riding this piece of astral soot for one piteous splinter of eternity.

All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.

"You don't believe in God," I said to Stein. "God is a word banging around in the human nervous system. He exists about as much as Santa Claus." "Santa Claus has had a tremendous influence, exist or not." "For children." "Lots of saints have died for God with a courage that's hardly childish." "That's part of the horror. It's all a fantasy. It's all for nothing."

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

When I see a paragraph shrinking under my eyes like a strip of bacon in a skillet, I know I'm on the right track.

Before the mind snaps, or the heart breaks, it gather itself like a clock about to strike. It might even be said one pulls himself together to disintegrate.