He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator -- though he would...

I can pretend it's all pretend! I can be the life of your death and you can be the death of my life… what a trade-off!

Small talk… Bernie resented it more than life itself. The weather, sports scores, frivolous gossip… nothing real, nothing serious, nothing meaningful about it. People were experts at wasting their...

Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?

Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million...

He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our...

Morning seems to come earlier every year I live.

What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless.

Dogs are great. Bad dogs, if you can really call them that, are perhaps the greatest of them all.

The best life you can have as you get into old age is good food, good teeth to eat it with, and few worries when you go to bed at night.

I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean. At any moment you may be strolling...

He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. His aspect was that of one who has been looking for the leak in a gas pipe with a lighted candle.

It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then...

Some people have a thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world.

E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where...

I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live...

Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to...

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences...

What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a...

I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is...

What is our life: {Pause.} it's looking forward or it's looking back. And that's our life. That's it. Where is the moment?

For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are the...

No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they?No. It's never like what you expected.Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?

Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.

On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the...

It is not so important, what happens to the body. I have led in some ways a blessed life. God has been good and not tested me. Now he does I cannot fail him. I have been vigilant over my heart, and I...