I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by bill posters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do- they think other people's opinions of them swing through great ares of approval or disapproval.

It’s awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don't want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can't turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.

I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm, and I can see I'm doing good, and them I'm doing good for know I'm doing it, and they love me, Unk, as best they can. I found me a home.

Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept record of their troubles. You’ll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.

Whisper quote famed radical anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, say, “The passion of destruction is also a creative passion."

"You hate him a lot?" Blackie asked.
Of course I don't hate him," T said. "There'd be no fun if I hated him." The last burning note illuminated his brooding face.
"All this hate and love," he said, "it's soft, it's hooey. There's only things, Blackie," and he looked round the room crowded with the unfamiliar shadows of half things, broken things, former things.

Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the seriousness of creators - and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it now become.

But from there on Howard Givings heard only a welcome, thunderous sea of silence. He had turned off his hearing aid.

The struggle begins when, at a certain age, a kid starts to experience the effects of his childhood and the possibility that his upbringing was flawed. It's hard to accept the idea that there is no ideal. Nothing is perfect. The hardest part, though, is when he or she begins the search for his or hers own idea of what is right. It's scary to search. You never know what resistance you might meet.

You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them? Old junkies are the same about junk. They gibber and squeal at the sight of it. The spit hangs off their chin, and their stomach rumbles and all their guts grind in peristalsis while they cook up, dissolving the body's decent skin, you expect any moment a great blob of protoplasm will flop out and surround the junk. Really disgust you to see it.
"Well, my boys will be like that one day," I thought philosophically. "Isn't life peculiar?"

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.

The fat woman's expression implied that she would go crazy on the spot if anybody did any more thinking.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person!

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. When Dorian had finished the letter, he felt that he had been forgiven.