“The paths to mountain peaks are ever rugged, but men reach the summits.”

“We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,Streaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soonNight closes round, and they are lost for ever;Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant stringsGive various response to each varying blast,To whose frail frame no second motion bringsOne mood or modulation like the last.We rest. -- A dream has power to poison sleep;We rise. -- One wandering thought pollutes the day;We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:It is the same!--For, be it joy or sorrow,The path of its departure still is free:Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;Nought may endure but Mutability.”

“Yes, interest! The worm of interest. Are you surprised? No? Yes? One conclusion I have reached here after a year in my cell is that the only emotion people feel nowadays is interest or the lack of it. Curiosity and interest and boredom have replaced the so-called emotions we used to read about in novels or see registered on actors' faces. Even the horrors of the age translate into interest. Did you ever watch anybody pick up a newspaper and read the headline PLANE CRASH KILLS THREE HUNDRED? How horrible! says the reader. But look at him when he hands you the paper. Is he horrified? No, he is interested. When is the last time you saw anybody horrified?”

“You only ever grow as a human being if you're outside your comfort zone.”

“Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.”

“he believed that there is no end to the mischief and hatred which men harbor deep in themselves and unknown to themselves and no end to their capacity to deceive themselves and that though they loved life, they probably loved death more and in the end thanatos would likely win over eros.”

“Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies—my only talent—smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.”