Oh, the secret life of man and woman--dreaming how much better we would be than we are if we were somebody else or even ourselves, and feeling that our estate has been unexploited to its fullest.

The sky lay over the city like a map showing the strata of things and the big full moon toppled over in a furrow like the abandoned wheel of a gun carriage on a sunset field of battle and the shadows walked like cats and I looked into the white and ghostly interior of things and thought of you and I looked on their structural outsides and thought of you and was lonesome.

Why do we spend years using up our bodies to nurture our minds with experience and find our minds turning then to our exhausted bodies for solace?

I don’t suppose I really know you very well - but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder.

Father said conflict develops the character

And only weaklings...who lack courage and the power to feel they're right when the whole world says they're wrong, ever lose.

Anything incomprehensible has a sexual significance to many people under thirty-five.