I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.

Dismantling the architecture of my discontent

The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.

Just think it, and chances are it will happen.

But even the facts do not always tell the truth

It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.

What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.

Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man.

As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.

It was. It will never be again. Remember.

It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.

To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.

Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

You can survive only if nothing is necessary to you

It's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom

Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

...once you fell in love with her, you loved her until the day you died.

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

Every man is the author of his own life.

Here I am of the air, a beautiful thing for the light to shine on. Perhaps you will remember that. I am...

To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body.

All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

You can’t punish someone for a lack of affection, can you? You can’t force a child to love you just because he’s your child.

As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out

As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.

I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author.

It was never possible for him to be where he was. For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and there. But never really here. And never really there.

If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics

When a man's only assets are the brain in his head and the tongue in his mouth, he has to think carefully before he decides to open that mouth and speak.

Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body, and even if the words have meaning, can sometimes have meaning, the music of the words is where the meanings begin....Writing as a lesser form of dance.

But that was the beauty of this particular game. The moment you lost, you won.

This is the kind of room poets are supposed to work in, the kind of room that threatens to break your spirit and forces you into constant battle with yourself.

Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land.

The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.

But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold. Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next.

What else we know? Nothing. That s why we re sitting together in this car now. Because we re the same, and because we don t know a damn thing other than that.

It was something like the word 'it' in the phrase 'it is raining' or 'it is night'. What that 'it' referred to Quinn had never known

In the end, each life is irreducible to anything other than itself. Which is as much as to say: lives make no sense.

They had come to the end of what they could talk about. Beyond that point there was nothing: the random thoughts of men who knew nothing.

Imagine knowing that you're good at something, so good that the world would be in awe of you if they could see your work, and then keeping yourself a secret from the world.

I became hypnotized by my own loneliness, unwilling to stop until my eyes wouldn't stay open anymore, watching the white line of the highway as though it was the last thing that connected me to the earth.

To think one thought meant thinking the opposite thought, and no sooner did that second thought destroy the first thought than a third thought rose up to destroy the second.

He has been marked by the past, and once that happens, nothing can be done about it. Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.

There is no escape from this. Either you do or you don't. And if you do, you can't be sure of doing it the next time. And if you don't, you never will again.

Con men and tricksters run the world. Rascals rule. And do you know why? because they are hungier than we are. because they know what they want. because they believe in life more than we do.

Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.