“The future is... black.”
“People can cry much easier than they can change.”
“It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.”
“Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it.”
“Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.”
“Be careful what you set your heart upon -- for it will surely be yours.”
“A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it.”
“When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.”
“The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.”
“Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
“The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
“A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.”
“The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”
“An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.”
“The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side.”
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
“There is a ''sanctity'' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.”
“It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”
“No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.”
“No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”
“Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.”
“But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.”
“We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.”
“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.”
“Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.”
“If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.”
“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.”
“Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.”
“The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”