That's the trouble with the world. We all despise ourselves. - Charlie Chaplin

At a friend’s house in Greenwich Village I remember talking of the frustration of trying to find the precise word for one’s thoughts, saying that the ordinary dictionary was inadequate. ‘Surely a system could be devised,’ I said, ‘of lexicographically charting ideas, from abstract words to concrete ones, and by deductive and inductive processes arriving at the right word for one’s thought.’ ‘There is such a book,’ said a Negro truck-driver: ‘Roget’s Thesaurus’ A waiter working at the Alexandria Hotel used to quote his Karl Marx and William Blake with every course he served me. A comedy acrobat with a Brooklyn ‘dis’, ‘dem’ and ‘dose’ accent recommended Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, saying that Shakespeare was influenced by him and so was Sam Johnson. ‘But you can skip the Latin.’ With the rest of them I was intellectually a fellow-traveller.

I love rain because tears can not be seen in rain.

كأن كل ما حدث لي في الماضي حلم. وكأن كل ما حدث لي في أمريكا هو فقط الواقع. ومع ذلك كان ينتابني طوال الوقت إحساس غير مريح بأن هذه الشوارع الفقيرة الرقيقة لديها القدرة حتى الآن على أن تطبق علي بيأسها كالرمال الناعمة.