In New Orleans I have noticed that people are happiest when they are going to funerals, making money, taking care of the dead, or putting on masks at Mardi Gras so nobody knows who they are.

What nuns don’t realize is that they look better in nun clothes than in J. C. Penney pantsuits.

This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.

....With pulleys and ropes and time to plan one could move anything. Now that she thought of it, why couldn’t anyone do anything he or she wished, given the tools and the time.

I have observed that it is no longer possible for one young man to speak unwarily to another not known to him, except in certain sections of the South and West, and certainly not with a book in his hand.

Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a walking genital.

Is all niceness then or is all buggery? How can a man be forty-five years old and still not know whether all is niceness or buggery? How does one know for sure?

Firing the sunset gun

But if there's nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all.

When these long telephone silences come, it is a sure sign that love is over.

Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.