Emotions and Feelings

[ Of a girl before marriage :] As an apple reddens on the high bough; high atop the highest bough the apple pickers passed it by—no, not passed it by, but they could not reach it.

Equal to the gods seems to me that man who sits facing you and hears you nearby sweetly speaking and softly laughing. This sets my heart to fluttering in my breast, for when I look on you a moment, then can I speak no more, but my tongue falls silent, and at once a delicate flame courses beneath my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears hum, and a cold sweat bathes me, and a trembling seizes me all over, and I am paler than grass, and I feel that I am near to death.

Equal to the gods seems to me that man who sits facing you and hears you nearby sweetly speaking and softly laughing. This sets my heart to fluttering in my breast, for when I look on you a moment, then can I speak no more, but my tongue falls silent, and at once a delicate flame courses beneath my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears hum, and a cold sweat bathes me, and a trembling seizes me all over, and I am paler than grass, and I feel that I am near to death.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it.

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this: Was it done with enjoyment—was the carver happy while he was about it?

Malefactors of great wealth.

[ Responding to the question of whether he was available to run for vice-president :] I am as strong as a bull moose and you can use me to the limit.

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

I have always been fond of the West African proverb: “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”

To borrow a simile from the football field, we believe that men must play fair, but that there must be no shirking, and that the success can only come to the player who “hits the line hard.”

[ Referring to his dog :] Fala’s Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on an Aleutian Island and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

This intimate alliance—which for me makes the true man—of pessimism of the intelligence, which penetrates every illusion, and optimism of the will.

It’s been so long since I made love I can’t even remember who gets tied up.

Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets!

If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’

The true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.

Even in Paris, I remained a Canadian. I puffed hashish, but I didn’t inhale.