In a civil war… every side is wrong. It’s hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim.

No man is infinitely strong; for every creature that runs, flies, hops or crawls there is a terminal nemesis which he will not circumvent, which will finally do him in.

You're killing yourself with cynicism. Your idols got taken away from you one by one and now you have nothing to give your love to.

There was a beauty in the trash of the alleys which I had never noticed before; my vision seemed sharpened, rather than impaired. As I walked along it seemed to me that the flattened beer cans and papers and weeds and junk mail had been arranged by the wind into patterns; these patterns, when I scrutinized them, lay distributed so as to comprise a visual language.

God can be good and terrible-not in succession-but at the same time. This is why we seek a mediator between us and him; we approach him through the mediating priest and attenuate and enclose him through the sacraments. It is for our own safety: to trap him within confines which render him safe.

Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.

I'd like to see you move up to the goat class, where I think you belong.