Teaching ... particularly in the 1990s, teaching what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history, is the same as walking up Broadway in Manhattan talking to yourself, except instead of eighteen people who hear you in the street talking to yourself, they're all in the room. They know, like, nothing.

Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.

I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.