"I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all, I can't even love myself. Why is that? Why can't I love myself? It's because I can't love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself."
"It seemed to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness."
"Only by learning the truth—whatever that truth might be—could people be given the right kind of power."
"In the name of God, they stole her time and her freedom, putting shackles on her heart. They preached about God's kindness, but preached twice as much about his wrath and intolerance."
"I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind."
"Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end."
"You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough."
"Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted."
"People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned."
"For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient."
"No, I don't want your money. The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you. I don't like to owe anybody anything, so I keep to myself as much on the lending side as I can."
"There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person's heart."
"It's not me but the world that's deranged."
"It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality."
"When you prick a person with a needle, red blood comes out- that's the real world."
"Sex with a married woman ten years his senior was stress free and fulfilling, because it couldn't lead to anything"
"Most of the psychological differences between men and women seem to come from differences in their reproductive system"
"If there's any guy crazy enough to attack me, I'm going to show him the end of the world -- close up. I'm going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I'm going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies."
"What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus."
"A certain something, he felt, had managed to work its way in through a tiny opening and was trying to fill a blank space inside him. The void was not one that she had made. It had always been there inside him. She had merely managed to shine a special light on it."
"At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past."
"You throw a stone into a deep pond. Splash. The sound is big, and it reverberates throughout the surrounding area. What comes out of the pond after that? All we can do is stare at the pond, holding our breath."
"It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words."
"But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words."
"Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells"