“Of course it’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.”

~

“There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock”

~

“Who put this brain inside of me? It cries. It demands. It says that there is a chance. It will not say ‘no’.”

“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”

~

“A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.”

~

‘The day flings itself upon you.’

~

‘If somebody reads this and your day and your night were akin to mine, then somehow we’ve touched, strange brother or sister, and we both understand that death is not the tragedy. You are alone and I am alone and it’s best that we aren’t together, comparing our pitiful sorrows.’

~

“We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us.”

~

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.“

~

‘You’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.’

~

“I have been treated better than I should have been—not by life in general nor by the machinery of things but by women.”