Recently added

"How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words."

A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange - of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow's abstract cost.

Love is dope, not chicken soup.

That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

He was conscious that something in [his] personality bolstered his confidence and allowed him to rest, to seek peace and find it. He never game a name to it, and never spoke of it. And never, never would he have allowed himself or anyone to call it – love

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. Yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?

Remember this central truth. Your enemy is there because he, too, has weighed the consequences of failure and accepts them. Play always to win, because nothing else matters

Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some sort of basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, goey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

At worst, they were vile creatures who needed to be wiped from the face of the earth. At best, such behavior shows a dangerous lack of self-control. The first business of a warrior is self-restraint

That everyone is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse.

There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free