And when a strong man is sweet, even Goddesses look down from Mount Olympus.

Roman influence seeds itself, sprouting mighty oaks right through the modern forest of computers, digital disks, microviruses and space satellites.

I wasn't sent here to find angels! I wasn't sent here to dream of them. I wasn't sent here to hear them sing! I was sent here to be alive. To breathe and sweat and thirst and sometimes cry.

Truth is a risky proposition. It's the nature of mediocre human beings to believe that lies are necessary, that they serve a purpose, that truth is subversive, that candor is dangerous, that the very scaffold of communal life is supported by lies.

Dickens is a very underrated writer at the moment. Everyone in his time admired him but I think right now he's not spoken of enough.

The world doesn't need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.

What had Jesse said? She is made of alabaster. And alabaster is a stone through which light can pass.

But all morality is of necessity shaped by context. I'm not talking relativism, no. To ignore the context of a decision is in fact immoral.

But the sky was never quite the same shade of blue again.

Whipping is fifty percent show and noise.

And I had the most disconcerting sensation: that in my memory she would look up from that game of solitaire and the sockets of her eyes would be empty.

The power of Satan will blast you into hell,' the boy bellowed, gathering his remaining strength.

'You keep saying that!' I said. 'And it keeps not happening, as we can all see!

One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.

What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it's that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness of
normality that is just a myth.

I think you're like a man who loses an arm or a leg and keeps insisting that he can feel pain where the arm or leg used to be.

Their lives are interconnected like thorny vines forever circling and recircling the same tree. Your life might have nothing to do with their bitter struggle.

I can't help being a gorgeous fiend. It's just the card I drew.

A dreadful suspicion was coming over me. Hadn't my mortal life been nothing but abysmal struggle and trivia and fear? Wasn't that the way it was for most mortals? Wasn't that the message of a score of modern writers and poets -- that we wasted our lives in foolish preoccupation? Wasn't this all a miserable cliche?

Why does shame and self-loathing become cruelty to the innocent ?

I had to have him, had to. Just the way I had to have everything I wanted; or had to do everything I'd ever wanted to do.