"You don’t stop caring, champ. You still care about that little girl whose underpants you saw in kindergarten. Once you care, you always care. That’s how stupid we are."

"College is a rip-off, the professors are teaching you stuff because they’re getting paid to do it, not because it does you any good. They don’t give a fuck about geography or whatever any more than you do. It’s all phony, they’re there because parents don’t want their kids around the house past a certain age and sending them to college makes them look good. ‘My little Johnny’s at Haavahd.’"

"Women, once sex gets out in the open, they become monsters. You're a creep if you fuck them and a creep if you don't."

"When Rabbit first began to drive the road was full of old fogeys going too slow and now it seems nothing but kids in a hell of a hurry, pushing. Let 'em by, is his motto. Maybe they'll kill themselves on a telephone pole in the next mile. He hopes so."

"Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven't done everything right in my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest sin. I haven't laid down and died."

"To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence."

"There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes."

"Man is an animal, but a social animal. Society for its manifold blessings asks in exchange sacrifice and compromise. Concession is the world's walking gait. Fevers and hallucinations sweep over us, it is true; but be they permitted to infect the public body, slaughter shall result. Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading."

"Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows."

"It was one of history’s great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range."

"The artistic triumph of American Jewry lay, he thought, not in the novels of the 1950s but in the movies of the 1930s, those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains projected Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of their own immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience."

"From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few."

"Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know."

"You are cynical."

"Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way."

"There was a beauty here, refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America."

"Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling."

"Like water, blood must run or grow scum."

"All men are boys time is trying to outsmart."

"His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill."

"Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules."

"Time is our element, not a mistaken invader."

"By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved."

"Sex is like money; only too much is enough."

"The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop."

"It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks latenesses, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patchings to repair great rents in the quotidian."

"An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause."

"Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner."

"I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken."

"Zeus had loved his old friend, and lifted him up, and set him among the stars as the constellation Sagittarius. Here, in the Zodiac, now above, now below the horizon, he assists in the regulation of our destinies, though in this latter time few living mortals cast their eyes respectfully toward Heaven, and fewer still sit as students to the stars."

"I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs."

"The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you."

"The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there."

"The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces blank in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here, why is this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of ‘any place,’ prelude to the ultimate, ‘Why am I me?’—ignites panic in his heart."

"He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realised that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame."

"What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it's this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus; he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it."

"The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect."

"He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks."

"As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world..."

"Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile."

"Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit."

"The male sense of space must differ from that of the female, who has such interesting, active, and significant inner space. The space that interests men is outer. The fly ball high against the sky, the long pass spiraling overhead, the jet fighter like a scarcely visible pinpoint nozzle laying down its vapor trail at 40,000 feet, the gazelle haunch flickering just beyond arrow-reach, the uncountable stars sprinkled on their great black wheel, the horizon, the mountaintop, the quasar — these bring portents with them and awaken a sense of relation with the invisible, with the empty. The ideal male body is taut with lines of potential force, a diagram extending outward; the ideal female body curves around centers of repose."

"Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency."

"Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art."

"For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do — they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities."

"In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse- quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up."

"It rots a writer’s brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you’re well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician."

"Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself."

"We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell."

"There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't."