“I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.”

“The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.”

“How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit. Nor do I believe in progr...”

“Stein resented the sedative power of religion, or rather the repose available to those blissfully ignorant that the medicament was a fictitious blank. In this exile from peace of mind to which his ...”

“Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.”

“But I made an issue of the precise wording of the vows. I wanted liberalized ones, with no outmoded Pauline nonsense exacting from the bride the promise to 'obey' the groom. Here I put my foot down...”

“To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.”

“The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.”

“The problems I had existed before I did, and I discovered them.”

“We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.”

“Advice," Doa Vorchenza chuckled. "Advice. The years play a sort of alchemical trick, transmuting one's mutterings to a state of respectability. Give advice at forty and you're a nag. Give it at sev...”

“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”