“The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is…”
“Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can’t help making fly-traps, and men can’t help making symbols. That’s what the human brain is there for – the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.”
“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.”
“I don’t want to die without any scars.”
“May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.”
“Now I understand that one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you’ve believed in all your life aren’t true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.”
“A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.”
“Even strength must bow to wisdom sometimes.”
“There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”
“You’re afraid of making mistakes. Don’t be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people’s faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.”
“But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can’t last.”
“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
“There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”
“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”
“Pain or love or danger makes you real again…”
“The best teacher is experience and not through someone’s distorted point of view.”
“‘I just won’t sleep,’ I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.”
