"Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking."

"The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense."

"The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous."

"Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions."

"An old codger rampant and still learning."

"The fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil worshipper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and that this light was also compassion."

"Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too."

"He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul."

"There was a thing called Heaven, but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."

"To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by Mind at Large-- this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual."

"Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence."

"Every ceiling when reached becomes a floor upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right."

"What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!"

"Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can't consume much if you sit still and read books."

"You pays your money and you takes your choice."

"La filosofía nos enseña a sentir incertidumbre ante las cosas que nos parecen evidentes. La propaganda, en cambio, nos enseña a aceptar como evidentes cosas sobre las que sería razonable suspender nuestro juicio o sentir dudas."

"However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for."

"All that happens means something, nothing you do is ever insignificant."

"And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble - the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know."

"There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self."

"Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation."

"Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something."

"I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example..."

"One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas, everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy?"

"There's so much one doesn't know; it wasn't my business to know. I mean, when a child asks you how a helicopter works or who made the world"well, what are you to answer if you're a Beta and have always worked in the Fertilizing Room? What are you to answer?"

"My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane..."That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual vortex. He went down slowly. "My soul is a thin, tenuous membrane..."

"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead."

"Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness."

"The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished not by doing something but by refraining from doing. Great is truth but still greater from a practical point of view is silence about truth."

"The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own."

"Well, I'd rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here."

"Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure."

"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."

"Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions."

"Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage's arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He was not worthy, not... Their eyes for a moment met. What treasures hers promised! A queen's ransom of temperament. Hastily he looked away, disengaged his imprisoned arm. He was obscurely terrified lest she should cease to be something he could feel himself unworthy of."

"Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure."

"Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves."

"Pain was a fascinating horror."

"What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure."

"All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours."

"Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?"

"The more science discovers and the more comprehension it gives us of the mechanisms of existence, the more clearly does the mystery of existence itself stand out."

"The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything."

"We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look."

"Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society."

"Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them."

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."

"He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words."

"The function of the well-intentioned individual, acting in isolation, is to formulate or disseminate theoretical truths. The function of the well-intentioned individuals in association is to live in accordance with those truths, to demonstrate what happens when theory is translated into practice, to create small-scale working models of the better form of society to which the speculative idealist looks forward."

"There were the years- years of childhood and innocence- when I had believed that carminative meant- well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my life- a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means windtreibend."