The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

Science arose from poetry… when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

No one loves the man whom he fears.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

More people should read books. It’s the most concentrated experience you can have.

Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.

Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.

We are not angry with people we fear or respect, as long as we fear or respect them; you cannot be afraid of a person and also at the same time angry with him.

Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.

Character is expressed through our behavior patterns, or natural responses to things.

If I held you any closer I would be on the other side of you.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.

It’s in the best interest of the radical left types – best psychological and strategic interest – to refuse to admit to the possibility that reasonable people can object to their ideological staff. Because if reasonable people objected, that would imply that their ideological stance is not reasonable.

People are generally proud of their food. A willingness to eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice… they open up to you in ways that somebody visiting who is driven by a story may not get.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

I am inclined to think that the realm of mythology is where the Yeti rightly belongs.

I have no human feelings.

Through fidelity, we situate ourselves and maintain ourselves in the hands of God so exactly as to become one with them in their action.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

I think I have the nicest fans in the world, and I quite like being surrounded by people if we’re all feeling the same emotion in the same room.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

I don’t keep people around me that aren’t family. You don’t get to stay. Unless you’re eating at the table with us, you’re not part. We eat together, we cry together, we live together, we die together. Everything that we do is for each other, and we care for another.

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

I read all the time, and I’m often struck by something I’m reading.

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

I love hugging people. I still hug everybody in my meet-and-greet lines.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‚people.‘ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

Faith is the complete reliance on the power and goodness of Spirit and the firm belief that you are always connected to this goodness. Always affirm your faith and not your doubt.

Country radio is much more like a family than any other group of people that I’ve met.

Without Cambodia, I may never have become a mother. Part of my heart is and will always be in this country. And part of this country is always with me: Maddox.

Our judgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile.

The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha.

My favourite poem is the one that starts ‚Thirty days hath September‘ because it actually tells you something.

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

You can stroke people with words.

I can analyze people’s intentions. Immediately. That’s just a warning. To everyone.

I read poetry to save time.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

I like to reminisce with people I don’t know.

When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference.

Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.