Perhaps the measure of the best art is that it does not excite envy.
Mediocrities flock to any movement which will indulge their self-pity and their self-righteousness, for without a Movement the mediocrity is on the slide into terminal melancholia.
It was better than floods of misery that a son of her flesh had killed the sons of other mothers. That burned in her heart like the pain which flared in the arthritis of her knees. Pain was a boring c...
I suspect Kierkegaard had just that in mind when he proposed that people had to be wary of feeling too saintly, since they could not be certain of the source of such feelings.
How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse.
The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide not murder.
As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.
Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty and a sense of the novel. His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is as pretentious as a rich whore, sentimental as a lollypop.
When you start to open a door, the pressure has to be greatest in the beginning, yet the door moves the least.
There remained a hole drilled through his heart.
Then comes the left jab again. A converted southpaw? It has something of the shift of locus which comes from making love to a brunette when she is wearing a blond wig.
That was how the tears went down Cherry's face...a teaspoon full of ten years' sorrow.
Since the sum of her experience had told her that the majority of one’s prayers to God were not answered, she prayed now directly to us, she called upon the Devil, she implored him.
Since I believe that I have been a devil for many centuries and have risen in rank and been demoted, it could be asked why, with such a history, I still learned a good deal while in Russia. It is beca...
Piety can also serve as a wall to keep the pious from recognizing how profoundly angry they are at God—this God who has failed to treat them by what they see as their proper right.
Nothing could be better than the moment when a woman opened her legs for you. That first time! If you had an eye for the little differences, you knew twice as much about her as you could learn from he...
I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind
His decision had been made in the valley, and it lay as an iron warp in his mind. He could have turned back no more easily than he could have killed himself.
Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
For if we are our own force, we are also a servant of the forces of the dead. So we have to be bold enough to live with all the magical forces at loose between the living and the dead. That is never f...