I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.
Even a mirror will not show you yourself, if you do not wish to see.
Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when you don't want them to.
That's life: trust and you're betrayed; don't trust and you betray yourself.
Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.
I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.
Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place. Trust your demon.
The absence of a monument can, in its own way, be something of a monument also.
To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago.
The death of an illusion tends to disconcert.
There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.
The power to hurt ... has evolved in a direct relationship to technological advancement.
If you ever loved anything in your life, try to remember it. If you ever betrayed anything, pretend for a moment that you have been forgiven. If you ever feared anything, pretend for an instant that those days are gone and will never return. Buy the lie and hold to it for as long as you can. Press your familiar, whatever its name, to your breast and stroke it till it purrs.
Between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today.
The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe.
It is anticipation and recollection that fill the heart—never the sensation of the moment.
If a building is falling on you, you don't concern yourself with the horn of an approaching car. You deal with the most immediate peril first. That's survival.
It would be nice if there were some one thing constant and unchanging in the universe. If there is such a thing, then it is a thing which would have to be stronger than love, and it is a thing which I do not know.
In the mirrors of the many judgments, my hands are the color of blood. I sometimes fancy myself an evil which exists to oppose other evils; and on that great Day of which the prophets speak but in which they do not truly believe, on the day the world is utterly cleansed of evil, then I too will go down into darkness, swallowing curses. Until then, I will not wash my hands nor let them hang useless.
There's really nothing quite like someone's wanting you dead to make you want to go on living.
I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences.
Love is a negative form of hatred.
Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty.
His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god.
The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: