[As] authorities "over" us are removed, as we wobble out on our own, the question of whether to be or not to be arises with real relevance for the first time, since the burden of being is felt most fully by the self-determining self.

The death of God represents not only the realization that gods have never existed, but the contention that such a belief is no longer even irrationally possible: that neither reason nor the taste and temper of the times condones it. The belief lingers on, of course, but it does so like astrology or a faith in a flat earth.

The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.

Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It's a conceptual art.

it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.

The things that stayed were things that didn't matter except they stayed, night and day, all seasons the same, and were peaceful to a fault and boded no ill but thought well enough of themselves to repeat their presences.

I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language as lousy as their life