You don't have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty.

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.

Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.

It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.

Husband and wife have no time left to spend together. Marriage took away our one reason for getting married.

We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl in the bourgeois box.

Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.

We're programmed for suffering, not joy. The masochism is built in at a very early age. You're supposed to work and suffer - and the trouble is: you believe it.

Tears are a form of communication - like speech - and require a listener.

There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but having no outlet, it implodes in a great fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul.

And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle

One of the things you learn about being married is that being with someone day in and day out can make you so comfortable that you risk losing your tact.

The first degree of humility is prompt obedience.

If it were up to me, I'd take away the guns

Finding that core of truth within yourself... That truth that knows and trusts that All Is Well, and that chooses Love... Is the greatest spiritual attainment you can ever make.

Emulation is a noble and just passion, full of appreciation.

Audacity, more audacity, always audacity.

When you struggle to reach for something you don't know, that's where most of the interesting stuff is.

The reformer has enemies in all who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order.

[Making Ordinary People] was a wonderful experience. Tremendous. I haven't seen it since. It belongs to the public now; it no longer really belongs to me.