“Take off my clothes and there becomes a man. Take off my skin and there becomes my bones. Break all my bones and there becomes my heart. Smash my heart and there becomes my soul. And that you cannot take.”
Source: The Legacy Letters: his Wife, his Children, his Final Gift
“Sometimes I travel just to be overwhelmed – for it’s good every now and then to be overwhelmed.”
Source: The Legacy Letters: his Wife, his Children, his Final Gift
“I travel for the great stories now ready tell, and those waiting to be told.”
Source: The Legacy Letters: his Wife, his Children, his Final Gift
“I travel to know where I fit into the world, and where I don’t.”
Source: The Legacy Letters: his Wife, his Children, his Final Gift
“As I see it, you GET married - but you MAKE a marriage.”
Source: The Legacy Letters: his Wife, his Children, his Final Gift
“Time. Either you are for it or against it. So be here now. Not later.”
Source: The Legacy Letters: his Wife, his Children, his Final Gift
“I travel for the jolting, angelic act of seeking strangeness and newness and profoundness.”
Source: The Legacy Letters: his Wife, his Children, his Final Gift
“I am ready for whatever's coming. I expect nothing but to be let down or turned away. I am alone. Goddamn. The shit hurts sometimes, but I realize what I am, what I have become.”
“There is a certain grief in things as they are, in man as he has come to be, as he certainly is, over and above those griefs of circumstance which are in a measure removable—some inexplicable shortcoming, or misadventure, on the part of nature itself—death, and old age as it must needs be, and that watching for their approach, which makes every stage of life like a dying over and over again. Almost all death is painful, and in every thing that comes to an end a touch of death, and therefore of wretched coldness struck home to one, of remorse, of loss and parting, of outraged attachments. Given faultless men and women, given a perfect state of society which should have no need to practise on men’s susceptibilities for its own selfish ends, adding one turn more to the wheel of the great rack for its own interest or amusement, there would still be this evil in the world, of a certain necessary sorrow and desolation, felt, just in proportion to the moral, or nervous perfection men have attained to. And what we need in the world, over against that, is a certain permanent and general power of compassion—humanity’s standing force of self-pity—as an elementary ingredient of our social atmosphere, if we are to live in it at all. I wonder, sometimes, in what way man has cajoled himself into the bearing of his burden thus far, seeing how every step in the capacity of apprehension his labour has won for him, from age to age, must needs increase his dejection. It is as if the increase of knowledge were but an increasing revelation of the radical hopelessness of his position: and I would that there were one even as I, behind this vain show of things!”
Source: Marius the Epicurean
“Kids. They're not tin cans or sheetrock. They're laughing machines. Wind them up and watch them go.”
Source: The Legacy Letters: his Wife, his Children, his Final Gift