Quote collection
519 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The trouble with you is that the only way you can communicate is through art. You’ve never learned to communicate your feelings to a man. You don’t even want to communicate in a relationship. You think that if you open up to love, you’ll lose your independence or your self-expression or creativity or whatever you call all that passionate, wonderful stuff that makes you feel alive inside."
"One tended to lose one’s bearings in the presence of willful and persistent acts of craziness, and the more gentle the act, the crazier it seemed, as if rage and violence, being closer to the norm, were easier to accommodate."
"Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good. Moreover, a lout thrashing about in the clear waters of wisdom will dirty those waters for everyone else."
"Things. Cosas. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land."
"And what would our ideas of God, of religion, be like if they had come to us through the minds of women? Ever think of that?"
"Listen, I've been sick ever since I started working here, but today I'm well and I won't be in anymore."
"Ultimately, the roast turkey must be regarded as a monument to Boomer's love."
"There's a certain Buddhistic calm that comes from having... money in the bank."
"Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots."
"Magic things are fond of deceptions."
"How we shape our understanding of others' lives is determined by what we find memorable in them, and that in turn is determined not by any potentially accurate overview of another's personality but rather by the tension and balance that exist in our daily relationships."
"Conservatives understand Halloween, liberals only understand Christmas. If you want to control a population, don't give it social services, give it a scary adversary."
"Summer had come to sit on New York's face."
"But do we know how to make love stay?' I can't even think about it. The best I can do is play it day by day."
"It is what it is. You are what you it. There are no mistakes."
"Nobody quite knew what to make of the moon any more."
"The Divine was expansive, but religion was reductive. Religion attempted to reduce the Divine to a knowable quantity with which mortals might efficiently deal, to pigeonhole it once and for all so that we never had to reevaluate it. With hammers of cant and spikes of dogma, we crucified and crucified again, trying to nail to our stationary altars the migratory light of the world."
"Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard."
"The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans' insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion."
"salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb."