...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.

An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.

Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.

Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed.

When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human beings are made.

The period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled.

The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.