I don’t think He bargains.” “Oh yes He does. I may not be religious but I know my Bible. My mother saw to that. He bargains all right. But He’s supposed to he just. If He wants belief He’d better provide some evidence.’ “That He exists?...
We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we endured birth. You can’t share either experience.
The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead.
It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all to soon, the very words "justice," "compassion," "society," "struggle," "evil," would be unhear...
Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.
Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.
I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.
You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful, provided that the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose.
Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.
It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us.
I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something n...
If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere.
There are few activities so agreeable as spending a friend's money to your own satisfaction and his benefit.
Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.
People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.
The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted.
