noah nomadic

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks latenesses, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patchings to repair great rents in the quotidian.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.

The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being "somebody," to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do—they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.