A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.
A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell!
Everyone who has ever built anywhere a ''new heaven'' first found the power thereto in his own hell.
From the very fountain of enchantment there arises a taste of bitterness to spread anguish amongst the flowers.
I should have no use for a paradise in which I should be deprived of the right to prefer hell.
It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation, had said, ''All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up.'' And they did.
It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
It is difficult to write a paradise when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.
Paradise is exactly like where you are right now… only much, much better.
Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.
The abominable effort to take one's sins with one to paradise.
We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
We, who have already borne on the road to Paradise the lives of the best among us, want a difficult, erect, implacable Paradise; a Paradise where one can never rest and which has, beside the threshold of the gates, angels with swords.