You can get all A's and still flunk life.

Why did God make women so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?

Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.

Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.

You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.

Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.

I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?

Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.

Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.

The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives...

Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.

I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.

Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.

There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.

In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.

Lost in the mystery of finding myself alive.

Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.

Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.

It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.

Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?

Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?

I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen.

People usually told him the same joke two or three times.

At night the years come back and perch around my bed like ghosts.

The origin of consciousness is the initiation of the sign-user into the world of signs by a sign-giver.

Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.

During my last year in college I discovered that I was picking up the mannerisms of Akim Tamiroff, the only useful thing, in fact, that I learned in the entire four years.

At that time the only treatment of angelism, that is, excessive abstraction of the self from itself, was recovery of the self through ordeal.

Nowadays when a good-looking woman flirts with me, however idly, I guffaw like some ruddy English lord, haw haw, har har, harr harr.

I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all.

...this miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes.

Misery misery son of a bitch of all miseries.

A great scientist once said that genius consists not in making great discoveries but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.

People who are ordinarily understood to dislike each other or at least to be indifferent toward each other discover that they have much in common.

But the expectation of the self, to be informed in its nothingness--if only I can get out of this old place and into the right new place, I can become a new person--places a heavy burden on travel.

...the self can be as desperately stranded in the transcendence of theory as in the immanence of consumption.

Soap shining beauty.

Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.

In my new freedom I remember thinking: If one knows what he wants to do, others will not only not stand in the way but will lend a hand from simple curiosity and amazement.

The second I left my old life's cowpath, I discovered I didn't need a drink. It became possible to stand still in the dark under the oaks, hands at my sides, and watch and wait.

School - You can get all A's and still flunk life.

Have you noticed that the narrower the view the more you can see? For the first time I understand how old ladies can sit on their porches for years.

How strange to think that you cannot pass along the discovery.

What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious.

The drowsiness returns. It is unwelcome. I recognize it as the sort of fitful twilight which has come over me of late, a twilight where waking dreams are dreamed and sleep never comes.