A book is like a child: it is easier to bring it into the world than to control it when it is launched there.
Battered Women: sounds delicious. Doesn’t make it right.
Travel is impossible, but daydreaming about travel is easy.
If you love something, let it go. If you don't love something, definitely let it go. Basically, just drop everything, who cares.
It's not always enough to be brave, I realized years later. You have to be brave and contribute something positive, too. Brave on its own is just a party trick.
There's always going to be one more thing. Because that's what infinite feels like. And the difference between love and everything else is that it's infinite, it's built out of something infinite, or it feels like it is, anyway, which is the same thing to us. You think a million billion more things will come your way, a million billion more versions of everything. But no, everything that actually causes that infinite feeling, the circumstances of every infinite feeling, is so, so finite.
Regret is just perfectionism plus time.
Something that was instilled in me by my parents at a very young age is that there is no happy life without a life of service. Over the course of my career, I've been fortunate to always encounter others who share that philosophy.
There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man - that is, the more divine - the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.
History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim.
Writing poetry is like always being in love. What masochism! What luxury!