The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.

A snowball in the face is surely the perfect beginning to a lasting friendship.

Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day.

If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter.

Often I wish this would all be over, Liesel, but then somehow you do something like walk down the basement steps with a snowman in your hands.

I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.

I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that's where they begin. Their great skills is their capacity to escalate.

No matter how many times she was told that she was loved, there was no recognition that the proof was in the abandonment.

It was the beginning of the greatest Christmas ever. Little food. No presents. But there was a snowman in their basement.

As always, one of her books was next to her.

If you can't imagine it, think clumsy silence. Think bits and pieces of floating despair. And drowning in a train.

God never gave man a thing to do concerning which it were irreverent to ponder how the Son of God would have done it.

Screw every known human culture.

The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.

The harder you fight to hold on to specific assumptions, the more likely there's gold in letting go of them.

Forgive thyself little, and others much.

Every once in a while I have this thought, we've got to piss off the religious people. How are we going to do that?

The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

When you get too big a majority, you're immediately in trouble.

If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.