Wherever you come near the human race there’s layers and layers of nonsense.

Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

Perhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more nonsense in our 'sense' than we would care to believe.

Now back to Malory.[…] As I go along, I am constantly jiggled by the arrant nonsense of a great deal of the material. A great deal of it makes no sense at all. Two thirds of it is the vain dreaming of children talking in the dark. And then when you are about to throw it out in disgust, you remember the Congressional Record or the Sacco and Vanzetti case or 'preventive war' or our national political platforms, or racial problems that can't be settled reasonably or domestic relations, or beatniks, and it is borne in on you that the world operates on nonsense — that it is a large part of the pattern and that knight errantry is no more crazy than our present-day group thinking, and activity. That is the way humans are. If you inspected them and their activities in the glass of reason, you would drown the whole lot.

Natural rights, nonsense; natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, elevated nonsense, nonsense going on stilts.

Do you not realize, Hastings, that each and everyone of us is a complete mystery with layers. We each try to judge each other, but nine times out of ten, we are wrong.

I hope my writing has many layers, as human beings have layers.

To a superior race of beings the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem equally ridiculous.

people live and die by nonsense. It's not what is so much as what people think is.

You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever.

In the face of the history of the human race what can be more silly or ridiculous than likes or dislikes founded upon race or religion?

I think there is something wrong with the human race. It undermines everything one would like to believe in, don't you think?

We have advanced to new and surprising levels of bafflement.

There's real strangeness in this world of ours. Back in the machine times, there was so much noise front and back, […] it kept us from knowing what lies behind the surface of things.