“Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.”

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: A Visit from the Goon Squad

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 6, The crisis of Confederation, p. 119

Variant: April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.
Source: Pudd'nhead Wilson and Other Tales

"O Russet Witch!"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the merry-go-rounds of childhood or adolescence; as never, surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters of youth. For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less, when we peel down our ambitions to one ambition, our recreations to one recreation, our friends to a few to whom we are anaesthetic; ending up at last in a solitary, desolate strong point that is not strong, where the shells now whistle abominably, now are but half-heard as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for death.

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

To make a man confess a loving God you burn him!
The Heretic (1968)

in his reply to Questionnaires of the MOMA museum, 1941
Gorky's quote refers on his multi-layered painting technique Gorky applied those days
1930 - 1941

"Icarus Allsorts", from The Mersey Sound (1967)