Life and Existence

I . . . once read the Old Testament and the four Gospels straight through, from a vainglorious desire to do what nobody else had done.

[ 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.

When I was a child my mother said to me, “If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.” Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognize that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. . . . To ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.

It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognize that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. . . . To ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden as if in caves.

Electric flesh-arrows . . . traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eye-lids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.

The only compliment he ever paid her was You sweat less than any fat girl I know.

Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that every thing that is born of her is planted in her.

Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that every thing that is born of her is planted in her.

Oh! ever thus, from childhood’s hour,

The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

[ J. Cheever Loophole, played by Groucho Marx, speaking :] I bet your father spent the first year of your life throwing rocks at the stork.

When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn't a sign that they "don't understand" one another, but a sign that they have, at last, begun to.

A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.

In the true man there is a child concealed - who wants to play.

In the true man there is a child concealed - who wants to play.

The relatives of a suicide always take it in bad part that he did not remain alive out of consideration for the family dignity.

The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes.

The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes.

Oh, my friends, that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child - let that be your word concerning virtue!

Youth's longing misconceived inconsistency.Those whom I deemedChanged to my kin, the friends of whom I dreamed,Have aged and lost our old affinity:One has to change to stay akin to me.

You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles whe na carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.

Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.