I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.

Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.

For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.

Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.

Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?

Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.

What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile.