Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
When all else fails, philosophize.
The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.
f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution. ){kind=small}
(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.
A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.
His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.
We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.
I am not the we of anyone
You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.” “I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet.
Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.
She gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. 'So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change.
For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.
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No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.' (Said to Paul by Elizabeth Costello, the interloping novelist-angel-inner voice).
He knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.
But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?
Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths
Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.
Well, that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity.
I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am.
He does not know what freedom is. Freedom is a word, less than a word, a noise, one of the multitude of noises I make when I open my mouth.
Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined.
I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best.
And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant
