1. “A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.”
2. ”All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.”
3. "Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved."
4. "But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art."
5. "Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker and a thrilling nymph"
6. "Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self."
7. "Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously."
8. "I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped."
9. “Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth -- well, it's like brown -- it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.”
10. “No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.”
11. “People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”
12. "Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference."
13. “Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.”
14. “The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.”
15. "The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all."
16. "There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship."
17. “The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.”
18. ”We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”
19. “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.”
20. “You are undergoing by accident and by your own fault a spiritual journey which many would consciously purchase at great price, but cannot buy. Your picture of yourself, your self-illusion, is in process of being broken. This places you in an unusual position, very close to the truth, and that proximity is part of your pain. / You describe your grief as a system. Indeed it is, a defensive system of mutually supporting falsehoods instinctively produced to defend your old egoistic self-image which you cannot bear to lose, you cannot bear its death which seems so like your own. Your endless talk of dying is a substitute for the real needful death, the death of your illusions. Your "death" is a pretend death, simply the false notion that somehow, without effort, all your troubles could vanish. This is where you are, and here a religious believer would pray; you must try to find your own equivalent of prayer. The word "will" rarely describes anything perceptible, but an act of will is needed here, an act of well-intentioned concentration. / I'm not telling you not to feel remorse and guilt, only to feel it truthfully. Truthful remorse leads to the fruitful death of the self, not to its survival as a successful liar. Recognise lies and reject them at every point. You want to unhappen what has happened, you feel anger and hate at what prevents this, and which you see as the cause of your "loss of honour." These old deep "natural" desires appear to you to be irresistible. Check them, see them to be illusions and lies. Move beyond them into an open and quiet area which you will find to be an entirely new place. / You say you live in pain. Let it be the pain of the death of the old false self, and the life-movement of the new real truthful self. We are all wrapped in silky layers of illusion which we instinctively feel to be necessary to our existence. Often these illusions are harmless, in the sense that we can still go on being reasonably good and reasonably happy. Sometimes, because of a catastrophe, a bereavement or some total loss of self-esteem, our falsehoods become pernicious, and we are forced to choose between some painful recognition of truth and an ever more frenzied manufacturing of lies. / Live at peace with despair. Live quietly with your sense of guilt. Sit beside it, as it were, and regard the frightful wound to your self-esteem as the removal of deep illusions which existed before and which this chance has torn. If you keep checking any lie and resisting the anger which deforms the world, you will gradually realise that the poor old wounded self, with its furious whining and its hatred of itself and everything else, is not you at all. That self is dying, but another self is watching it die.”
