A dream inside a dream might not be a dream.
Ah me, thou Destiny, Giver of evil gifts.
All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage.
Any time you're throwin' dirt you're losin' ground.
Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else.
Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.
Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them.
Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and now
Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.
Even if what you're working on doesn't go anywhere, it will help you with the next thing you're doing. Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot.
Even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering.
Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased.
Fear of an enemy can often blind men to other hazards, not least the shape which they themselves make in the world.
For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.
He may be dead; or, he may be teaching English.
Hell ain't half full.
How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?
I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me that he does.
I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.
I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.
I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that's just about the best kind of luck you can have.
I guess if everybody went crazy together nobody would notice.
I yearn for the darkness. I pray for death. Real death. If I thought that in death I would meet the people I've known in life I don't know what I'd do. That would be the ultimate horror. The ultimate despair. If I had to meet my mother again and start all of that all over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to? Well. That would be the final nightmare. Kafka on wheels.
I've seen the meanness of humans till I don't know why God ain't put out the sun and gone away.
If people knew the story of their lives, how many would then elect to live them?
If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.
If you break little promises, you'll break big ones.
If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable.
In every trade save war men of talent and vigor prosper. In war they die.
In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.
It is not my experience that life's difficulties make people more charitable.
It starts when you begin to overlook good manners. Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.
It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.
Last words are only words.
Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.
Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.
Men believe death's elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.
Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.
Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
My daddy used to tell me not to chew on somethin' that was eatin' you.
No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later.
Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.
Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.
One of the things you realize about gettin' older is that not everybody is goin' to get older with you.
Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.
People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.
Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
Somewhere in the world is the most invincible man. Just as somewhere is the most vulnerable.
Teaching writing is a hustle.
The core of literature is the idea of tragedy... You don't really learn much from the good things that happen to you.
The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.
The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.
The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one.
The point is there ain't no point.
The societies to which I have been exposed seemed to me largely machines for the suppression of women.
The trouble with a liar is he can't remember what he said.
The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.
The world was new each day for God so made it daily. Yet it contained within it all the evils as before, no more, no less.
There is for a man two things in life that are very important, head and shoulders above everything else. Find work you like, and find someone to live with you like. Very few people get both.
There is no God and we are his prophets.
There is no greater monster than reason.
There's a difference between quittin' and knowin' when you're beat.
There's hard lessons in this world. What's the hardest? I don't know. Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They ain't comin' back.
This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give up.
To see God everywhere is to see Him nowhere.
War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.
What joins men together... is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.
What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.
When the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be their yet.
When the shooting starts would you rather be armed or legal?
When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.
Where men can't live gods fare no better.
Word gets around when the circus comes to town, don't it?
Words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.
You are either born a writer or you are not.
You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.
You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.
You go back home and everything you wished was different is still the same and everything you wished was the same is different.
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.
Found 83 occurence(s) in 52,783 quotation(s).
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