I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them--at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them.

A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!

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

The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.

'Haunted by the past' is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, 'haunted', the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface