“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
“All people are insane. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”
“All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.”
“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”
“If you don’t identify where you want to go, the road to get there stays hidden.”
“So the day became one of waiting, which was, he knew, a sin: moments were to be experienced; waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding.”
“Life is wasted on the living.”
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
“I don’t want to die without any scars.”
“This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.”
“At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.”
“We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it’s our job to invent something better.”
