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.

In New Orleans I have noticed that people are happiest when they are going to funerals, making money, taking care of the dead, or putting on masks at Mardi Gras so nobody knows who they are.

What nuns don’t realize is that they look better in nun clothes than in J. C. Penney pantsuits.

This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.

....With pulleys and ropes and time to plan one could move anything. Now that she thought of it, why couldn’t anyone do anything he or she wished, given the tools and the time.

I have observed that it is no longer possible for one young man to speak unwarily to another not known to him, except in certain sections of the South and West, and certainly not with a book in his hand.

Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a walking genital.

Is all niceness then or is all buggery? How can a man be forty-five years old and still not know whether all is niceness or buggery? How does one know for sure?

Firing the sunset gun

But if there's nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all.

When these long telephone silences come, it is a sure sign that love is over.

Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendos The blackbird whistling Or just after.

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

Reality is a clich from which we escape by metaphor.

The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.

We live in an old chaos of the sun.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.

The imperfect is our paradise.

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.

The mind can never be satisfied.

I am what is around me.

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The way through the world Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.

In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully.