"We're a dramatic people," Perry Mason said slowly. "We're not like the English. The English want dignity and order. We want the dramatic and the spectacular. It's a national craving. We're geared to...

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.

People are supposed to fear the unknown, but ignorance is bliss when knowledge is so damn frightening.

Blessed are the idiots, for they are happiest people on earth.

From a certain height, everyone looks the same - men, women, villains, kings - as if rank and fortune were simply an accident of perspective.

Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.

Many voices argue that it is exclusionary to claim that you have the truth, but as we have seen, that view itself sets up a dichotomy with you as the heroically tolerant and others as villainously or...

Your story does not live in your soul, only in your mind.

The colour of the magpie, her father was saying, was symbolic of creation. The void, the mystery of that which had not yet taken form. Black and white, he said. Presence and absence.

The researcher's gaze often found more than he wished to find.

Love is a one-way street. Love, like respect isn't something you get; it's something you give

Just before I doze off, I counsel myself grandiosely: Fuck concepts. Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and...

He was a man who knew there were such things as jokes in the world or people would not write about them, but had never actually been introduced to one or shaken its hand.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

You can't regulate integrity

We reach with our hands and brush away the clouds and pierce the sky to reach the moon and Mars but we still can't reach the truth

"I saw that you can't do anything for anybody. We can't save each other. Or ourselves." "What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You're denying brotherhood, Shevek!" the tall girl cried....

Love that wants only to get, to possess, is a monstrous thing

Youth is a deception - a deception of the press and textbooks. The best time of life! {...} Youth is the most difficult time of existence.

Death is neither there nor here, it rises on every path. It is in you and in me as soon as we betray life

In fact, at times I preferred to live in the forbidden world, and frequently my return home to the bright realm, no matter how necessary and good that might be, was almost like a return to someplace...

One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error.

That's the problem with wishes, they ensnare you. In fairy tales they're nothing but trouble, magnifying the greed and vanity of the person for whom they are granted.

How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was, and always will be stronger than us. We can't destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on...

Feelings do not grow old along with the body. Feelings form part of a world I don't know, but it's a world where there's no time, so space, no frontiers.

Is there some vital connection between Norman church architecture and the milking of beef cattle of which I am unaware?

Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities.

I'm not so sure innocence exists anymore.

Sam had a skill that often let him take what he needed. But you couldn't do that with love. It had to be given. Shared.

"The real shit {that was Mo’s mantra} is pigeons, not their shit. Divorce is when you take away what you no longer need from those you no longer love."