Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.

According to the moral absolutism that characterizes McCandless's beliefs, a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn't a challenge at all.

A WISHSometimes I wish that he will liveand I will see him.But mostly I wish that he will die, and take my memories with him.

To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beast

A fool and his money are soon parted.

My biggest fear ever is to be involved in a plane crash, so when that happened... well, I'm just thankful to be alive. I'm just grateful to be here at all.

I could justify violence only in this extreme case, to save the last living knowledge of Buddhism itself.

I wouldn't have a nose job. I like my nose fine.

It is better to arouse envy than pity.

Hendrix inspired me, but I was still more into Wes Montgomery. I was also into the Allman Brothers around the time of those albums.

Plausibility is a trap for the truth laid by lies.