The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!

Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.

That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can’t confront it.

She will speculate that she didn’t fully know her husband—this will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband “alive” in her memory—elusive, teasing.

How exhausted I am suddenly!—though this has been Ray’s best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling—almost—exhilarated.

It is the most horrific thought—my husband died among strangers.

The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.

For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.

It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed—to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!

When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child, then he will return, and not before.

For me, the Church is the enemy.

When you come to Christ, you have to give up all the other gods.

Independence didn't have to be exile.

The world is really heading in a very dangerous direction, it becomes that much more valuable and important to go to the movies and see human beings that are human beings.

We are divorced, North from South, because we have hated each other so. If we could only separate politely, and not have a horrid fight for divorce.

There have been many instances of people combining the political life with the spiritual life, a life of constant self-examination. Gandhi was a great example of that.

The sexual freedom of today for most people is really only a convention, an obligation, a social duty, a social anxiety, a necessary feature of the consumer's way of life.

A young man without ambition is an old man waiting to be.

My kid is not going to wear a flat bill.