The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.
The sentimental person thinks things will last — the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.
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.
The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.
The brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it.
Strange children should smile at each other and say, “Let’s play.”
Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.
Receding from a grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there.