"Destiny is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved."

"When William Faulkner embarked for Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize, one of his neighbors said, 'Now, Bill, you do right, you hear?' He meant, don't get drunk and fall on the King of Sweden."

"People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."

"The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress."

"When a woman behaves like a man, why can't she behave like a nice man?"

"The major concrete achievement of the women's movement of the 1970s was the Dutch treat."

"I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too."

"They break up Men's Clubs, which, they say, mean discrimination. Then they establish Women's Clubs, in which no men are allowed. They accuse men of being Sexists. Then they behave like Sexists. They say they want Sensitive Men. When they encounter such men, they shove them about. To put it plainly, their New Woman wants to be like the Old Man. And maybe even worse."

"The Queen is most anxious to enlist every one who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'Woman's Rights', with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety."

"The number of fools is infinite."

"It is always fools who set out on journeys. It is always fools who set out on any endeavor. But fools do seem to me bold in their foolish laughter, and courageous in the way that they look out for pleasure."

"They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce."

"The wonderful thing about the French is that they have been so imprinted by Descartes that anything that cannot be parsed to cartesian coordinates must be absurd. Who or what, however, is absurd, we may ask, when judgments of that kind are set forth as philosophy?"

"Nobody can simply bring together a country that has 265 kinds of cheese."

"The French would eat anything that wouldn't outrun them."

"I do not dislike the French from the vulgar antipathy between neighbouring nations, but for their insolent and unfounded airs of superiority."

"Had he critically examined his assumptions, he would never have put his peculiar mental disposition naïvely on view, as he has done in The Interpretation of Dreams."

"A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature."

"Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods."

"I have gave up frivolity with the exception of goin into town once in a while to take a bath."

"Life is too short to learn German."

"A verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German."

"God can make an ass with three tails, but not a triangle with four sides."

"He is not like a human being, like the white god. He is a power. That power could be in a cup of coffee. The Great Spirit is no old man with a beard."

"The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he may have molded the clay. You cannot have knowledge and worship at the same time. Mystery is the essence of divinity. Gods must keep their distances from men."

"Nevertheless, my intention is fixed, and soon Ragnhild will be thanking the mercy of the Lord, who moved my heart to send her these sheep. And so praise will rise up to Him who is fond of praise, but gives little in return for it."

"There I stood at the gate of God,
Drunk but unafraid."

"Early Buddhism recognized no gods because it had to free itself from an inheritance of nearly two million gods."

"When we use the word 'holy' today, we usually refer to a state of moral excellence. The Hebrew kaddosh, however, has nothing to do with morality as such but means 'otherness,' a radical separation. ...Now the seraphs were crying, 'Yahweh is other! other! other!'"

"Gods always love the people who make 'em."

"God is merciless. Those who say he is good do not know him. He is the most inhuman thing there is. He is wild and incalculable as lightning. Like lightning out of a cloud which one did not know contained lightning. Suddenly it strikes, suddenly strikes down on one, revealing all his cruelty. Or his love -- his cruel love. With him anything may happen. He reveals himself at any time and in anything."

"god is on the side of the best digestion"

"The divine is not human; it is something quite different. And it is not noble or sublime or spiritualized, as one likes to believe. It is alien and repellent and sometimes it is madness. Or so I have found it."

"In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over the slightest things."

"Denys's method became normative in Greek theology. In the West, however, theologians would continue to talk and explain. Some imagined that when they said 'God,' the divine reality actually coincided with the idea in their minds. Some would attribute their own thoughts and ideas to God -- saying that God wanted this, forbade that and had planned the other -- in a way that was dangerously idolatrous. The God of Greek Orthodoxy, however, would remain mysterious, and the Trinity would continue to remind Eastern Christians of the provisional nature of their doctrines."

"If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God."

i find it possible to forgive
the universe
i meet it in a give and take spirit
although i do wish
that it would consult me at times"

"Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly all nature seeks God and works toward him."

"The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself."

"He is a monster. ... I care less than nothing for Zeus. Let him do as he likes."

"The inhabitant or soul of the universe is never seen; its voice alone is heard. All we know is that it has a gentle voice, like the voice of a woman, a voice so fine and gentle that even children cannot become afraid. And what is says is: Sila ersinarsinivdluge, 'Be not afraid of the universe.'"

"O God, since You have today, to heap up confusion on me and increase my shame, so vilely taken from me the city I loved most on earth, in which I was born and reared, where my father is buried and where the body of St. Julian lies hidden, I shall certainly pay You back as best I can, by taking from You that part of me which You love best, my soul."

"Father, forgive us for what we must do.
You forgive us, and we'll forgive you."

"God don't make no mistakes. That's how He got to be God."

"If there is a God, he is a malign thug."

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing, all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."

"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."

"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

"As a True Christian, I don't gossip, but I am not above disseminating information that might provide my readers with something to fill an otherwise awkward lull in conversation. "

"Lot's wife was salt and barren, because she was full of loss and mourning, and looked back."

"Or imagine Lucille in Boston, at a table in a restaurant, waiting for a friend. She is tastefully dressed -- wearing, say, a tweed suit with an amber scarf at the throat to draw attention to the red in her darkening har. Her water glass has left two-thirds of a ring on the table, and she works at completing the circle with her thumbnail. Sylvie and I do not flounce in through the door, smoothing the skirts of our oversized coats and combing our hair back with our fingers. We do not sit down at the table next to hers and empty our pockets in a small damp heap in the middle of the table and sort out the gum wrappers and ticket stubs, and add up the coins and dollar bills, and laugh and add them up again. My mother, likewise, is not there, and my grandmother in her house slippers with her pigtail wagging, and my grandfather, with his hair combed flat against his brown, does not examine the menu with studious interest. We are nowhere in Boston. However Lucille may look, she will never find us there, or any trace or sign. We pause nowhere in Boston, even to admire a store window, and the perimeters of our wandering are nowhere. No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the seagulls, could know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie."

"The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return."

"Yet at the last I knew all grief was one. It is the same bare cup whether it had been spilled or never held the wine."

"Too many of my circle are apt when inviting me to their homes to stress the fact that they are only expecting me for the weekend and to dwell with too much enthusiasm on the excellence of the earlier trains back to the metropolis on Monday morning."

"I like company, I just don't like when they visit."

"What do you take me for, an idiot?"

"a good many
failures are happy
because they don't
realize it many a
cockroach believes
himself as beautiful
as a butterfly
have a heart o have
a heart and
let them dream on"

"Dawn and its excesses have always reminded me of heaven, a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable."

"When I once heard a man threatened with hell-fire for taking his sister-in-law as a concubine, he replied, 'We should not be so cruel, and God is not crueller than we are.'"

"For the point about Hell -- as of Heaven -- is this: when there, you are in your proper place, which, finally, is exactly where you want to be."

"This is Hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room; we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink the water, and we wait for something which will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen."

"if you get gloomy just
take an hour off and sit
and think how
much better this world
is than hell
of course it won t cheer
you up much if
you expect to go there"

"Belief in eternal hell-fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell."

"I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine."

"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."

"Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever."

"The behaviour of Henry VI makes it easy to understand why, in the preceding centuries, it had been considered that there was something sacred about lunatics."

"The next King, Henry VI, was only one year old and was thus rather a Weak King; indeed the Barons declared that he was quite numb and vague. When he grew up, however, he was such a Good Man that he was considered a Saint, or alternatively (especially by the Barons) an imbecile."

"The world of a heterosexual is a sick and boring life!"

"As for Thucydides, his lack of historical feeling -- in our sense of the phrase -- is conclusively demonstrated on the very first page of his book by the astounding statement that before his time (about 400 B.C.) no events of importance had occurred (ou megala genesqai) in the world!"

"There is a deep relation between the attitude that is taken towards the historic past and the conception that is formed of death, and this relation is expressed in the disposal of the dead."

"If there is a natural and perhaps inevitable tendency toward the destruction and disappearance of the documents most widely used, this poses a discomfiting problem for the historian. For he inevitably relies heavily on the surviving printed matter. Is the historian, then, the victim of a diabolical solipsism? Is there an inverse relation between the probability of a document surviving and its value as evidence of the daily life of the age from which it survives?"

"History repeats itself; that's one of the things that's wrong with history."

"I read somewhere that something like seventy-five percent of all men have a homosexual experience at some time in their lives, and the other twenty-five percent are retarded or something."

"I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell."

"Faggots have survived Christianity, psychiatry, social ostracism, jail, earth, air, wind and fire, as well as the pink triangle and concentration camps. Nothing can reckon with you if you can reckon with yourself."

"We must remember, as queers, that we are the only minority oppressed by law; the sex we have is illegal in half the U.S."

"Homosexuality is God's way of insuring that the truly gifted aren't burdened with children."

"Those who behave in a homosexual fashion ... shall not enter the kingdom of God."

"I've learned that God doesn't dislike homosexuals, like a lot of Christians think. AIDS isn't their fault, just like it isn't my fault. God loves homosexuals as much as He loves everybody else."

"It is better to be faithful than famous."

"If peace cannot be maintained with honor, it is no longer peace."

"Courage is like love; it must have hope for nourishment."

"Hope is the worst of the evils, for it prolongs the torment of man."

"The alleged dirt on my floor which several society leaders have been tactless enough to point out is perfectly clean dirt, such as old newspapers, magazines, detective stories, pencil ends, orange peels, sawdust and sand. What's so disgraceful about that?"

"what is your favorite dish
said mars and do you believe
in the immorality of the soul
stew i said and yes
at least mine is immortal
but i could name several others
that i have my doubts about"

"human wandering through the zoo
what do your cousins think of you"

"the human race never would
take my advice
and now just look at it"

"i suppose the human race
is doing the best it can
but hells bells thats
only an explanation
its not an excuse"

"A man thinks
he amounts to a lot
but to a mosquito
a man is
merely
something to eat"

"Drinking when we are not thirsty and making love all year round, madam; that is all there is to distinguish us from other animals."

"The trouble with human nature is that you're stuck with it."