Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.

Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.

I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.

Seymour once said to me--in a crosstown bus, of all places--that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, day and night, heat and cold.

I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.

"You love your parents, don't you?"
"Yes, I do - very much," Teddy said, "but you want to make me use that word to mean what you want it to mean - I can tell."
"All right. In what sense do you want to use it?"
Teddy thought it over. "You know what the word 'affinity' means?" he asked, turning to Nicholson.
"I have a rough idea," Nicholson said dryly.
"I have a very strong affinity for them. They're my parents, I mean, and we're all part of each other's harmony and everything," Teddy said. "I want them to have a nice time while they're alive, because they like having a nice time... But they don't love me and Booper - that's my sister - that way. I mean they don't seem able to love us just the way we are. They don't seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It's not so good, that way."