"Ms Tanaka said she understood the need for the United States to pursue this area, to conduct the research,"

"Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods."

"Every gesture is a revolutionary act."

"Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!"

"There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist."

"I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory."

"To be understood is to prostitute oneself"

"Having never discovered qualities in myself that might attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me."

"But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?"

"We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky."

"...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad."

"I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am."

"The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart."

"Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day."

"The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life."

"I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless."

"But I am not perfect in my way of putting things Because I lack the divine simplicity Of being only what I appear to be."

"Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!"

"I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything."

"I have learned to fail. And I have had my say."

"Life is a terrible thing, thank God."

"Great is the hand that holds dominion over/Man by a scribbled name."

"There shall be corals in your beds, There shall be serpents in your tides, Till all our sea-faiths die."

"Which is the world? Of our two sleepings, which / Shall fall awake when cures and their itch / Raise up this red-eyed earth?"