The finest of pleasures are always the unexpected ones.

Gilda’s book ends with her acceptance of what I had called, in working with her, “delicious ambiguity,” the freedom that comes with simply not knowing the outcome of every happening or happenstance.

Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still

Pleasure to me is wonder — the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.

The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.

The more a thing is perfect, the more it feels pleasure and pain.

Absurdity is what I like most in life.

The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.

Pleasurable is dispassion in the world,
The getting beyond sensuality.
But the putting away of the conceit 'I am' — this is the highest pleasure.

The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.

Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss.

Pleasure to me is wonder — the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.

Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities