“You could sit in there all day drinking coffee and they never asked you to leave no matter how bad you looked. They just asked the bums not to bring their wine and drink it there. Places like that ...”

“Turgenev was a very serious fellow but he could make me laugh because a truth first encountered can be very funny. When someone else's truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it ...”

“All right, God, say that You are really there. You have put me in this fix. You want to test me. Suppose I test You? Suppose I say that You are not there? You've given me a supreme test with my par...”

“I'd decided the campus was just a place to hide. There were some campus freaks who stayed on forever. The whole college scene was soft. They never told you what to expect out there in the real worl...”

“To think, somebody had suicided for that.”

“There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. H...”

“There is something relentless about the serenity of nature which has a crushing effect on the human mind. The lavish splendour of her phases, which completely ignores human strife, fills the race o...”

“Almost every day I can feel myself suffering mainly in the head, I can explain the pain to myself but knowing it comes from an inflammation of my imagination doesn't prevent it being reality itself...”

“I guess in this culture of ever-shortening attention spans, it's good if a song can lift us out of the madness, even if only for a few minutes.”

“Love, like madness, can only fill the models that society makes available.”

“PTSD in its rawest form is a death sentence which causes many veterans and others to execute themselves in hope to be free.”

“That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”

“No one asks poor people if they want war. Nor had anyone asked these poor people if they wanted to die of thirst and exposure on the coastal sea, or if they wanted to be robbed and raped by their o...”

“Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.”

“The rich are all alike, to revise Tolstoys famous words, but the poor are poor in their own particular ways. Any reasonably intelligent reader could blow that generalization apart in the time it ta...”