"The church does not mind hypocrisy, which is a flattering tribute to its power."

"Her faults are terrible faults, but she has not the fault of hiding them by falsehood."

"Every man is a hypocrite."

"The right sort of woman can distinguish between Creative Lassitude and plain shiftlessness."

"I thought you were having one of your spells. You get them because you're so energetic all the time. You ought to lie in the hammock in the afternoons with a book."

"As Italian is the language of song, Irish is the voice of flattery."

   "The man happened to be Irish and naturally enough he urged her the woman to include Ireland on her itinerary. But the lady was disinclined.
   "'No,' she said firmly. 'I am told that Ireland is cold and damp and full of Catholics.'
   "'Well, Madam,' said the clerk ... 'You'd better go to hell, for there it's warm and dry -- and full of Protestants.'"

"There never was and there never will be an army so strong that an Irishman will not fight it, if he sees it as an enemy."

   "'It doesnt matter about the means. Any means taken by anybody to expel rapacious foreigners from Irish soil are justified.'
   "'I doubt if any moral theologian would accept that.'
   "'Then he wouldn't be an Irishman, so what would he know of moral theology?'"

"Before St. Patrick came and ruined a perfectly decent society, Ireland was governed by traditional laws, called the 'Brehon Lawns,' which covered everything: property, education, medicine, death, succession, inheritance, crime. These included the law of hospitality: not tradition, not rule, but law of hospitality. You would disgrace yourself, your family, and your tribe if perchance a stranger were strolling in your part of the country and he were allowed to pass your portals without being offered sustenance for the journey. And not just leavings of the table, but the best of what you had."

"Kenneth Tynan once said that the only people who can do Russian drama, outside of the Russians themselves, are the Irish. I presume that's because we are somewhat manic in the mood department. It's no bother to soar from the darkest depths to the mountaintop of delight, with the heart borne by all of that which is alive and singing. It's even less bother to swan-dive into the pits of despair and total hopelessness, with the realization, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan once sagely observed, that it's no use being Irish unless you know the world is eventually going to break your heart."

"Veronica Wedge was one of those girls who, if they have not plenty of precious stones on their persons, feel nude. Her aim in life was to look as like a chandelier as possible."

"The Jews are a nervous people. Nineteen centuries of Christian love have taken a toll."

"This is the last of earth. I am content."

"Waiting, are they? Waiting, are they? Well, let 'em wait."

"Codeine ... bourbon."

"Now comes the mystery!"

"Now, God be with you, my dear children. I have breakfasted with you and shall sup with my Lord Jesus Christ."

"I have tried so hard to do the right."

"Goodbye, everybody!"

"I am mortally wounded, I think."

"My God. What's happened?"

"No, it is better not. She will only ask me to take a message to Albert."

"All my possessions for one moment of time!"

"God damn the whole friggin' world and everyone in it but you, Carlotta."

"Hey, Rama." ("Oh, God.")

"God damn you."

"I know that I am going where Lucy is."

"All is lost. Monks, monks, monks!"

"On the contrary."

"Oh, do not cry. Be good children and we will all meet in heaven."

"Why not? Why not? Why not? Why not? Yeah."

"Strike the tent."

"I wonder why he shot me."

"Why are you weeping? Did you imagine that I was immortal?"

"There is nothing in this world worth worrying about."

"Pardonnez-moi, monsieur."

"Do not hack me as you did my Lord Russell."

"It has all been most interesting."

"Are you sure it's safe?"

"Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard! I could hang a dozen men while you're screwing around!"

"Lord help my poor soul."

"I love you, Sarah. For all eternity, I love you."

"Put out the light."

"Nonsense, they couldn't hit an elephant at this distance."

"What is the answer?" [Silence; then she laughed:] "In that case, what is the question?"

"If this is dying, I don't think much of it."

"I have just had eighteen whiskeys in a row. I do believe that is a record."

"God bless ... God damn."

"Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six."

"Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something."

"Freedom!"

"'Tis well."

"I still live."

"Go away. I'm all right."

"Now God be praised, I will die in peace."

"Please don't lie to me, unless you're absolutely sure I'll never find out the truth."

"Life is a daring adventure or it is nothing."

"life s too dam funny
for me to explain
it s kicks or money
life s too dam funny
it s one day sunny
the next day rain
life s too dam funny
for me to explain"

"My head hurts, my feet stink, and I don't love Jesus."

"Lust is the direct cause of birth, which is the direct cause of misery and death."

"Life is on the wire. All the rest is waiting around."

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

"But the Spider Grandmother did give two rules. To all men, not just Hopis. If you look at them, they cover everything. She said, 'Don't go around hurting each other,' and she said, 'Try to understand things.'"

"My greatest fear was that I might live and die and not matter."

"He never believed the part about Pip and Estella being happy ever after; he never believed that about anyone."

"All is for the best, though we cannot always see it at the time."

"Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove."

   "In these days in which we live, when existence has become a thing of infinite complexity and fate, if it slips us a bit of a goose with one hand, is pretty sure to give us the sleeve across the windpipe with the other, it is rarely that we find a human being who is unmixedly happy. Always the bitter will be blended with the sweet, and in this mélange one can be pretty certain that it is the former that will predominate.
   "A severe indictment of our modern civilization, but it can't say it didn't ask for it."

"i know that i am bound
for a journey down the sound
in the midst of a refuse mound
but wotthehell wotthehell
oh i should worry and fret
death and i will coquette
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai"

"Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Roumania."

"It is not true that life is one damned thing after another -- it is one damned thing over and over."

"Only a very few people are artists in life; the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts."

"Here's a man, I thought, who would change his life if he could do it by changing his hat. ... I wanted to slap him around, wake him up. He had the capacity to see but not the guts; he mucked in the drivel of his life, afraid to go into the subterranean currents that dragged him about. A man concealed in his own life, scared to move, holding himself too close, petting himself too much."

"Away with funeral music -- set
The pipe to powerful lips --
The cup of life's for him that drinks
And not for him that sips."

"Don't take life so serious, son -- it ain't nohow permanent!"

"What is the purpose of our being here? The old people say it is to experience and to realize the Great Mystery."

"I don't ask for much of this world. Just peace, solitude, causeless wealth, and some sort of broad immunity to criminal prosecution. And yet things never fail to blow up in my face."

"Loneliness bothers lots of people. I knew a woman once who was so lonely she married an old man with a limp and had four children in five years, and none of it helped at all."

"A cosmic loneliness was my shadow. Nothing and nobody around me really touched me. It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams."

"Anything you do deeply is lonely. Even the Zen students here, the ones who are going deep are very lonely."

"The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone open the mind of a man to all that is hidden from others."

"They say there going to charge three sents for a letter pretty soon. That aint going to stop me though, Mable. There aint no power in heavin or earth, as the poets say, as can come between you and me, Mable. You mite send a few three sent stamps when you rite."

"One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend."

"Marie. The sheer simplicity of the name seemed perfect. He'd written poems to her and torn them up at once as though the room were full of spies."

"I lied and told her I loved her
she didn't care but anyway
I said that we'd still be friends
and she didn't care but anyway
I tried last week for to call her
she wasn't home but anyway
I think I'll spend my life alone
I really don't care right now but anyway"

"I have loved with all my heart one hundred women I never want to see again."

"Two weeks is ample time for a man of ardent temperament to confirm his first, hastily formed opinion that he has met the only girl he could ever love."

"I never loved another person the way I loved myself."

"If love is the answer, would you please rephrase the question?"

"They're soul mates. She has about as much brain as a retarded billiards ball, and he approximately the same."

"Anyway, it seems to be the unknown country from which no traveler ever returns. What seems to be a returning person is a person born in the strange country with the same-looking ears and hands. He is a stranger to the person who fared forth, and a stranger to family and old friends. He is clothed in mystery henceforth and forever."

"It always interests a fiancé to meet his fiancée's father and his fiancée's prospective fiancé."

"There is no such thing as natural affection."

"Delight without well-wishing may be cruel; well-wishing without delight easily tends to become cold and a little superior. A person who wishes to be loved wishes to be the object of a love containing both elements, except in cases of exreme weakness, such as infancy and severe illness."

     "'I said we were twin souls, and we are twin souls, but under prevailing conditions what's the good of our being twin souls? Where do we go from there? I mean, you can't get away from the fundamental fact that you're married.'
     "'No, I'm not.'
     "'Pardon me. You must have forgotten. I distinctly heard Binstead announce you as "Mrs Stubbs".'
     "'But Cedric's dead.'
     "'I'm sorry to hear that,' said Sir Gregory politely. 'Here today and gone tomorrow, what? Who is Cedric?'
     "'My husband.'
     "Sir Gregory, who had taken another salted almond, held it poised in air. He looked at her with a wild surmise."

"Love was the problem, not the solution. Being hit by a car was better than love."

"Tell me this, my friend: Was what I was feeling at that moment real? Or was I just working very hard not to think about the Earth, and all the things I might have to do but didn't want to, and investing all that emotion into her just because she happened to be there and willing?"

"To reach maturity in the late twentieth century is to learn that romantic love is a myth, created by the needs of the spirit and the skill of the songsmiths and the confusion of a spiritual being left, for a time, with nothing spiritual to believe in."

"I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love."

"Our shizophrenic patient is actually experiencing inadvertently that same beatific ocean deep which the yogi and saint are ever striving to enjoy; except that, whereas they are swimming in it, he is drowning."

"O Lord, sir, when a heroine goes mad she always goes into white satin."

"The simplest definition of a mentally ill person is -- to me -- the most acceptable: i.e., a person who does not function properly in the environment, 'one who does not cope.' I do not cope. Of course, I cope every so often, but there are whole days, even weeks, when my behavior is, to put the best face on things, eccentric."

"See, the human mind is kind of like ... a pi�ata. When it breaks open, there's a lot of surprises inside. Once you get the pi�ata perspective, you see that losing your mind can be a peak experience."

"One thing they don't tell you about shock treatments, for months afterwards you got flyaway hair."

"Small steps to the madhouse still get us there at last."

"Never mind the fact that purity of heart is more important than trivial externals. Miss Manners never argues that point. She only maintains that it is possible, under some circumstances, for a lady to murder her husband; but a woman who wears ankle-strap shoes and smokes on the street corner, though she may be joy to all who know her and have devoted her life to charity, could never qualify as a lady."

"Young wives to old husbands take astonishing liberties."

"You reminded me of Hamlet. What you need is a jolly, lively wife to take you out of yourself, the sort of wife who would set booby traps for the Bishop when he came to spend the night."

"I'd marry again if I found a man who had $15 million and would sign over half of it to me before the marriage, and guarantee he'd be dead within a year."

"i have purposely avoided
matrimony in the interest
of the higher life
but i might just
as well have been a domestic
slave for all the freedom
i have gained"

"I don't think I'll get married again. I'll just find a woman I don't like and give her a house."

"What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; but what they do not do we are told expressly, they neither marry nor are given in marriage."

"Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house."

"People often say that marriage is an important thing, and should be much thought of in advance, and marrying people are cautioned that there are many who marry in haste and repent at leisure. I am not sure, however, that marriage may not be pondered over too much; nor do I feel certain that the leisurely repentance does not as often follow the leisurely marriages as it does the rapid ones."

"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same."

"I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. They've experienced pain and bought jewelry."

"Marriage is better than leprosy because it's easier to get rid of."

"In Biblical times, a man could have as many wives as he could afford. Just like today."

"You're only young once, but you can always be immature."

"What is strange is that we may remember what we have done, but not always why we did it."

"A man in the house is worth two in the street."

"You ain't no oil paintin'. But you're a fascinatin' monster."

"Men are but children, too, though they have gray hairs; they are only of a larger size."

"Giving a man space is like giving a dog a computer: The chances are he will not use it wisely."

"The passionate and violent soul of the age, always vacillating between tearful piety and frigid cruelty, between respect and insolence, between despondency and wantonnness, could not dispense with the severest rules and the strictest formalism. All emotions required a rigid system of conventional forms, for without them passion and ferocity would have made havoc of life."

"Medieval life in its typical aspects resembles a compulsive ritual designed to provide protection against the all-pervading potato-blight of sin, guilt, and anguish; yet it was unable to provide it so long as God and Nature, Creator and Creation, Faith and Reason, were split apart. The symbolic prologue to the Middle Ages is Origen cutting off his private parts ad gloriam dei; the epilogue is provided by the parched voices of the schoolmen: Did the first man have a navel? Why did Adam eat an apple and not a pear? What is the sex of the angels, and how many can dance on the point of a pin?"

"The body may be oppressed and manacled and yet survive; but if the mind of man be fettered, its energies and faculties perish, and what remains is of the earth, earthly. Mind should be as free as the light or as the air."

I don't think clearly -- too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought run on a track of the Central Nervous System -- the New York Central Nervous System, to make it worse."

"Beware of thoughts that come in the night. They aren't turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources."

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled."

"Our age has robbed millions of the simplicity of ignorance and has so far failed to lift them to the simplicity of wisdom."