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It is illegal for women to go topless in most cities, yet you can buy a magazine of a woman without her top on at any 7-11 store. So, you can sell breasts, but you cannot wear breasts, in America.

I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.

There’s always this peculiar disconnect between how people exist in the world and how they think the world is supposed to exist; it’s almost as if Americans can’t accept an important truth about being alive. And this is the truth to which I refer: culture can’t be wrong. That doesn’t mean it’s always “right,” nor does it mean you always have to agree with it. But culture is never wrong. People can be wrong, and movements can be wrong. But culture - as a whole - cannot be wrong. Culture is just there.

What a sad era when it is easier to smash an atom than a prejudice.

Three backpackers are struggling along the main street against the wind. Each is toting both a backpack and a front-pack. A sniper would despair of wounding them fatally. One even carries a third bag in her hand, from which protrudes the corner of a kitchen sink.

Time was when you could just push backpackers over and watch them writhe like flipped beetles. Today you have to trip them at the top of an incline so that they roll unstoppable down it in their casing of possessions.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully.
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.”
“And he has Brain.”
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has Brain.”
There was a long silence.
“I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.

I would like to beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way to the answer.

A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation. Wine can be a wiser teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books.