Verities & Balderdash

“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”

Sweetheart I’ve been frightfully busy but you know I have thought of you every minute.

After all, the best thing one can do when it is raining is let it rain.

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.

Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue. Success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

[Growing up] is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of True Romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.

I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go.

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.

Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.

The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.