So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear but never caught, the unicorn has been preserved by an unmatched device wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths.

As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one's attending upon you; but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

Your thorns are the best part of you.

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.

Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.

Camels are snobbish and sheep, unintelligent; water buffaloes, neurasthenic-- even murderous. Reindeer seem over-serious.

Omissions are not accidents.

The hands are the heart's messengers.

The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.

When one cannot appraise out of one's own experience, the temptation to blunder is minimized, but even when one can, appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser.

Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.

The world is not worthless but one should know how to get work done from it, because everyone is God, they all have different work to do. Therefore do not have dislike for anything in this world.

To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.

There would be no grand absolution, only forgiveness meter out in these precious sips. I would well up from Hugh's heart in spoonfuls, and he would feed it to me. And it would be enough.

It takes a man of unusual character to openly confront his own shortcomings. It’s so much more convenient to blame others.

The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.

[Congress] can just make [Mitt] Romney president. And we'd be like, "All right, fine."

Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.

Jesus's first temptation was to be relevant: to turn stones into bread. Oh, how often I wished I could do that!

My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization.