“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...”

“Sometimes things are just what they seem to be and that's all there is to it.”

“I do think that poetry is important though, if you dont strive at it, if you dont fill it full of stars and falseness.”

“If I bet on humanity, I'd never cash a ticket.”

“He could almost hear the wail of pain that went up from his heart. It was a sharp terrible personal pain the kind of pain that comes only when someone to whom you have never done any harm turns on ...”

“Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.”

“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”