You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.

Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.

...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it.

…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.