We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It is the price we pay for these times of ours.

Watch birth and death:The lotus has alreadyOpened its flower.

But facts, remembered or not, are all, alas, still facts

The average novel invariably reads like a detective's report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective.

It is painfully easy to define human beings. They are beings who, for no good reason at all, create their own unnecessary suffering.

Reflection may be essential to a scholar, but it’s taboo in social intercourse.

People may make fun of me because I’m wearing something odd, but it’s still good to be alive.

It’s so unrewarding, being a woman.

Living as I do with human beings, the more that I observe them, the more I am forced to conclude that they are selfish.

There was nothing so very unfamiliar about the excitement she was feeling, and yet it felt always like a new excitement. It was, in other words, a perennially unfamiliar feeling.

Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things.

the most comfortable characteristic of the period [1775-1825], and the one which incites our deepest envy, is the universal willingness to accept a good purpose as a substitute for good work.

I didn't know what narcissism was until I beheld my own naricssus.

An honest money system is the only alternative.

A peacetime draft is the most un-American thing I know.

I'm a pretty cliché actor in that I hate watching myself on film.

To live with all my might, while I do live

Do not let emotions fluctuate with the up and down of your capital.

I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.

Mama, humanity is my business.

You could weave silk from pig bristles before you could make a man anything but a man.