If you get hung up on everybody else's hang-ups, then the whole world's going to be nothing more than one huge gallows.

He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.

I don't know these people and they aren't my flowers.

There are not too many fables about man's misuse of sunflower seeds.

Elizabeth's voice had a door in it. When you opened that door you found another door, and that door opened yet another door. All the doors were nice and led out of her.

There was something dead in my heart. I tried to figure out what it was by the strength of the smell. I knew that it was not a lion or a sheep or a dog. Using logical deduction, I came to the conclusion that it was a mouse. I had a dead mouse in my heart.

Like some kind of strange vacuum cleaner I tried to console him. I recited the same old litanies that you say to people when you try to help their broken hearts, but words can't help at all. It's just the sound of another human voice that makes the only difference. There's nothing you're ever going to say that's going to make anybody happy when they're feeling shitty about losing somebody that they love.