It's fashionable in some circles to be pessimistic about America, about conservative solutions, about the Republican Party. I utterly reject that pessimism.
You cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands.
Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.
I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
We are living in a world in which we don't give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics of a lot of punk music and so on is very, life sucks and then you die, sort of theory. I feel life is cheaper and death is more attractive now than it was when I was an adolescent, as I remember. Suicide was a personal pathology when it was committed. There was no society approval of it, like there certainly is in Palestine and some quarters of Iraq.
Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?
Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
To "know thyself" must mean to know the malignancy of one's own instincts and to know, as well, one's power to deflect it.
Nothing is given to you. You're going to have to work for it.
Defeat isn't bitter if you don't swallow it.
Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn't have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control over.