Of all the things we can feel with our minds and bodies, severe pain is the purest, for it drives everything else from our awareness and focuses us as perfectly as we can ever be focused.

The functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion and empathy.

The whisper of the dusk is night shedding its husk.

Where there is cake, there is hope. And there is always cake.

Petting, scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditation and almost as good for the soul as prayer.

Nothing is worse than being alone on the evening of the day when one's cow has exploded.

Only once in a generation does anything as fresh as a vomiting detective come along.

The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every time piece with a digital readout blinks us towards implosion.

Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.

Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.

Given my heritage and the ordeal of my childhood, I sometimes wonder why I myself am not insane. Maybe I am.

He’s not yet realized that by giving away nothing but barefaced lies he’s come to wither and rot inside. But she’s still looking for him into the void of his cold heart.

Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.

There's an Elvis movie on the marquee sign, we've all seen at least three times.

Give me, kind heaven, a private station, a mind serene for contemplation.

He wasn't just masculine and sexual, he was carnal in a set-your-teeth-on-edge kind of way; he was almost frightning.

Each nanosecond of history branches off into an infinite amount of parallel universes.

To be possessed by Jesus and to possess Him - that is the perfect reign of Love.

If you want to be witty, say what you think at all times

Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.

[The Federal Convention] is really an assembly of demigods.