“Neurosis is the natural by-product of pain avoidance.”

“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.”

“You can't avoid pain, but you can choose to overcome it.”

“most days go
nowhere
but the avoidance
of pain and
dissolution are
lovely.”

“It is less important to escape pain than to avoid exceptionless rules.”

“Any form of idealism involves avoiding some specific pain or suffering.”

“Truth is too big a price to pay for the luxury of avoiding pain now and then.”

“He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.”

“We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.”

“He was acting on a reason other than the avoidance of pain. The sentiment was loyalty, and it felt glorious.”