It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.
They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens.
She planted that terror of debt so deeply in her children that even now, in a changed economic pattern where indebtedness is a part of living, I become restless when a bill is two days overdue. Olive never accepted the time-payment plan when it becam...
for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them.
I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and a...
...evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.
It is argued that because they believed thoroughly in a just, moral God they could put there faith there and let the smaller insecurities take care of themselves. But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individual...
In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tens...
That's why I'm talking to you. You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.
The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts will do the same thing in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in a path or a breath caught at the sight of a pretty girl or a finger nail nicked in the garden soil.
Will liked to live so that no one could find fault with him, and to do that he had to live as nearly like other people as possible.
What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.
Sexuality with all its attendant yearnings and pains, jealousies and taboos, is the most disturbing impulse humans have.
My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.
Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.
He had an idea that even when beaten he could steal a little victory by laughing at defeat.
