If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

Whose little boy are you?

...all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me...

A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.

Anyway, I have long had a very definite tendency to tune out the moment I come anywhere near either a pulpit or a soapbox.

The longing for sweets is really a yearning for love or "sweetness.

Regret nothing. Everything broken can be remade. And everything remade can once again be broken

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.

The little bit you and me might change the world, " Malloy smiled, "it wouldnt show up until a hundred years after we were dead. We'd never see it.""But it'd be there.

To understand an artist is to be a genius.

Tis the common disease of all your musicians that they know no mean, to be entreated, either to begin or end.

...clatter of a typwriter suggests that you're actually building something.

Dogs are high on life. Cats need catnip.

I just do what I do because it feels right. Other people attach labels to that.

I'm something like the old soak who never knew whether his wife told him to take one drink and come home at 12, or take 12 and come home at one.