“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
“Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.”
“After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.”
“I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”
“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
“There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.”
“I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.”
“No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.”
“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
“No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.”
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
“It takes two to make an accident.”
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.”
“I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.”
“Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.”
“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”
“Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.”
“The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.”
“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”
“What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”
“The ability to hold two competing thoughts in one’s mind and still be able to function is the mark of a superior mind.”
“I don’t care about truth. I want some happiness.”
“I may turn out an intellectual, but I’ll never write anything but mediocre poetry.”
“I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
“I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.”
“The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want.”
“All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.”
“It is not life that’s complicated, it’s the struggle to guide and control life.”
“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives.”
“For what it’s worth, it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over”
“His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.”
“I never blame failure – there are too many complicated situations in life – but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.”
“Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”
“The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.”
“Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.”
“Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.”
“Strange children should smile at each other and say, ‘Let’s play.'”
“The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way.”
“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”
“To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.”
“Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.”
“Everywhere we go and move on and change, something’s lost–something’s left behind. You can’t ever quite repeat anything, and I’ve been so yours, here”
“The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing … maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.”