To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.
Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.
You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.
In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlors of indignation the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil. (p. 51)
Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.
What are men? Children who doubt.
Every life is a profession of faith, and exercises an inevitable and silent influence.
Boredom or being sick of what you've done before is a big part of being in a band.
The eyes of a poet discover in each person a unique and irreplaceable humanity. While arrogant intellect seeks to control and manipulate the world, the poetic spirit bows with reverence before its mysteries.