He Died With His Eyes Open

She doesn’t think she’s worthy to live. But she doesn’t realize, she is life.

Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.

Every day you amass knowledge in a frantic race against death that death must win. You want to find out everything in the time you have; yet in the end you wonder why you bothered, it'll all be lost. I keep trying to explain this to anyone who will listen.

I have taken a terrible beating from the truth and feel tamed, wise and desperate, as if I had taken a short route to wisdom through a mirror, and cut myself badly on it as I passed through.

...perhaps, when it got utterly dark, the peace of the darkness would become the same as light so that my last experience would become as mysterious and musical as my first, so that in my last darkness there might not be the same need of understanding anything so far away as the world anymore.

I became as hard as whipcord, but with a brain like cottonwool.

It’s like the tragedy of the whole world in a little glass,’ she said. ‘Great things are all smashed to pulp, and none of us who are left have the spirit to carry on.

All the evil in the world is powerless against intelligence and courage.