“Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.”

“If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.”

“i find nothing more depressing than optimism.”

“The implicit optimism of the [field service post card] is worth notingthe way it offers no provision for transmitting news like I have lost my left leg or I have been admitted into hospital wounded...”

“The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask tobe imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.”

“Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.”

“You see, in this country are a number of youths who do not like to work, and the college is an excellent place for them.”

“Sometimes the gap between what you are and what you want to be is a little piece of paper called your college degree. So jump.”

“I only want to write. And there's no college for that except life.”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”

“Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more complet...”

“All this wondering was the weather vane on top of the building of unrest and of discontent”

“Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”