Great Throughts Treasury

"You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it."

"I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you. But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary."

"In memory everything seems to happen to music."

"Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question."

"The future is called "perhaps," which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you."

"Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else."

"Time is the longest distance between two places."

"We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress."

"A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace."

"A bedroom is just as nice as whoever sleeps in it with you."

"A bitch is no match for a lady except in a brass bed, honey, and sometimes not even there."

"A vacuum is a he'll of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with."

"A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages."

"A woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion."

"A witch and a bitch always dress up for each other, because otherwise the witch would upstage the bitch, or the bitch would upstage the witch, and the result would be havoc."

"All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness."

"Accept whatever situation you cannot improve."

"All good art is an indiscretion."

"All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress."

"But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark that sort of make everything else seem unimportant."

"Caged birds accept each other but flight is what they long for."

"Civilization is just a slow process of learning to be kind."

"Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick."

"All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be."

"All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent."

"At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable."

"And besides, when you love somebody, you mustn't listen to what they say. They say things to hurt you because they're afraid of being hurt themselves. You must look at their eyes...and feel their hearts!"

"But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary."

"Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion."

"Death commences too early--almost before you're half acquainted with life--you meet the other."

"Death is one moment, and life is so many of them"

"Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth."

"Don't you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands and who knows what to do with it?"

"Everyone says he's sincere, but everyone isn't sincere. If everyone was sincere who says he's sincere there wouldn't be half so many insincere ones in the world and there would be lots, lots, lots more really sincere ones!"

"Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable."

"Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead."

"Every time you come in yelling that God damn 'Rise and Shine' 'Rise and Shine' I say to myself, 'How lucky dead people are"

"Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life."

"Eternity! Didn't it give you the cold shivers?"

"Everything has its shadowy side."

"For time is the longest distance between two places."

"For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura -- and so goodbye. . . ."

"Funerals are pretty compared to death. Funerals are quiet, but deaths not always."

"Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are."

"Guessing isn't knowing."

"Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person."

"Hate is a thing, a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding."

"Go, then Go to the moon you selfish dreamer."

"Guilt is universal."

"High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace."