Sept 21.
I would really like you to see a picture of that sculpture “Ecstasy of St. Therese.” I believe the sculptor is Bernini. I’ve never seen any great works of art in person but I guess I’m familiar with most European Art through books I’ve studied. I once saw a picture of Christ by a Russian artist that really haunted me for a long time. Christ didn’t look anything like the popular beaming Western Christian version of the kindly shepherd we’re used to. 
He looked like a man, with a gaunt, lean, sort of haunted face with deep set large dark eyes. You could tell he was pretty tall, angular, rangy, a man alone and I guess that was the most striking thing about the picture. No halo, no radiant beam from heaven above. Just this extraordinary man— this ordinary human being who made himself extra-ordinary and tried to tell us all that it was nothing more than any of us could do. Loneliness and a hint of doubt seemed to fill the picture. I would like to have known the man in that picture.
--Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

His mother called them his gems and often asked him why he liked things that were worn and old. It would have been hard to tell her. But there was something about the way in which the link of a chain was worn or the thread on a bolt or a castor-wheel that gave him a vague feeling of pain when he ran his fingers over them. They were like worn shoe-soles or very thin dimes. You never saw them wear, you only knew they were worn, obscurely aching.
--Henry Roth, Call It Sleep

When everyone drowns and I'm the only one to escape, God is protecting me. When everyone else is saved and I'm the only one to drown, God is protecting me then too.
--Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation Of Christ

Which is nonsense, for whatever you live is Life. That is something to remember when you meet the old classmate who says, "Well now, on our last expedition up the Congo-" or the one who says, "Gee, I got the sweetest little wife and three of the swellest kids ever-" You must remember it when you sit in hotel lobbies or lean over bars to talk to the bartender or walk down a dark street at night, in early March, and stare into a lighted window. And remember little Susie has adenoids and the bread is probably burned, and turn up the street, for the time has come to hand me down that walking cane, for I got to catch that midnight train, for all my sin is taken away. For whatever you live is life.
--Robert Penn Warren, All The King's Men

How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said. 
I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it.
Nobody would know it.
It wouldn't make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else died too.
--Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
--Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

No, but why is Croft that way? 
Oh there are The Answers. He is that way because of the-corruption-of-the-society. He is that way because he is having problems of adjustment. It is because he is a Texan. It is because he has renounced God. He is that way because he was born that way, or because the Devil has claimed him for one of his own, or because the only woman he ever loved was untrue to him.
--Norman Mailer, The Naked And The Dead