“the problem with knowing is that it takes away the possibility of pretending!”

“We all pretend for a while or for a lifetime. But pretending is not living...I believe that God meant for life to take our breath away, sometimes because of the sheer joy of it all and sometimes because of the severe pain. To choose living over pretending means that we will know both.”

“Knowing whether or not man is free involves knowing whether he can have a master. The absurdity peculiar to this problem comes from the fact that the very notion that makes the problem of freedom possible also takes away all its meaning. For in the presence of God there is less a problem of freedom than a problem of evil. You know the alternative: either we are not free and God the all-powerful is responsible for evil. Or we are free and responsible but God is not all powerful. All the scholastic subtleties have neither added anything to nor subtracted anything from the acuteness of this paradox.”

“Killing an animals oneself is more often then not a way to forget the problem while pretending to remember. This is perhaps more harmful than ignorance. It is always possible to wake someone from sleep, but there is no amount of noise that will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.”

“You can't take away knowledge, and it's dangerous to pretend you never had it.”

“some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.”