Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.

There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.

But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.

The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning: The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.

In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.

Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world.