"I am not what you see and hear."

"The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism."

"...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about."

"Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it."

"To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people."

"...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking."

"There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it."

"That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine..."

"My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired."

"In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote."

"He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied."

"Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist."

"... it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak."

"Words and a book and a belief that the world is words..."

"American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret."

"All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression."

"Capital T-truth is about life before death."

"Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto."

"Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence."

"Everything I’ve ever let go of had claw marks on it."

"I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting."

"...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome."

"I am concentrating docilely on the question why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to reagain control."

"I wish you way more than luck."

"There are secrets within secrets, though--always."

"It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am -- so where does that put me?"

"To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end."

"The true thoughts that go on inside us are just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of, at most, one tiny little part of us at any given instant."

"The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection."

"When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him."

"It is named the "Web" for good reason."

"I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers..."

"Yes, I'm paranoid — but am I paranoid enough?"

"Look. Listen. Use ears I'd be proud to call our own. Listen to the silence behind the engines' noise. Jesus, Sweets, listen. Hear it? It's a love song. For whom? You are loved."

"Life's endless war against the self you cannot live without."

"Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky."

"And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles."

"That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people...That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them."

"I'm just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN."

"Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it."

"There are very few innocent sentences in writing."

"This is water."

"She committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal-first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm."

"She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself."

"The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages."

"Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you."

"-the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer."

"That what appears to be egoism so often isn't."

"My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me."

"The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror."