The Winter of Our Discontent

I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.

It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

To be alive at all is to have scars.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.

Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?

People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all.

You know how advice is - you only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyways.

I guess I'm trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again.

Intention, good or bad, is not enough.

So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.

When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something--anything--before it is all gone.

We can shoot rockets into space but we can't cure anger or discontent.

Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future.

What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.

For the most part people are not curious except about themselves.

Failure is a state of mind. It's like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it.

In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms

If you want to keep a friend, never test him.

Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?

He saw something that makes a man doubtful of the constancy of the realities outside himself. It was the shocking discovery that makes a man wonder if I've missed this, what else have I failed to see?

You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.

Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn't do anything about it.

Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared.[...]It's slow. It rots out your guts.

Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.

...intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over...

Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.

A day, a livelong day, is not one thing but many. It changes not only in growing light toward zenith and decline again, but in texture and mood, in tone and meaning, warped by a thousand factors of season, of heat or cold, of still or multi winds, torqued by odors, tastes, and the fabrics of ice or grass, of bud or leaf or black-drawn naked limbs. And as a day changes so do its subjects, bugs and birds, cates, dogs, butterflies and people.