I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.
I just wish insignificance had more stature.
When you're in the desert, you look into infinity.... It makes you feel terribly small, and also in a strange way, quite big.
The desire to be significant casts a pall.
I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.
The sense of paralysis proceeds not so much out of the mammoth size of the problem but out of the puniness of the purpose.
I don't feel like I even need to contribute.
I hope we're not just human garbage drifting toward a big sewer. But I think so.
When you stand up there on top of the world, you become so humble.
I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.
It was a sad loss, this illusion of importance, a humbling blow.
It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.
I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.
One of the greatest evils of the day among those outside of prison is their sense of futility. Young people say, What is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment.
