“Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.”

“A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections...”

“Human beings, Lucretius thought, must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in t...”

“There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them o...”

“Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”

“What do you think of when you think of mourning?' Jenny asks.The question snaps me back to attention. I answer without really thinking. "I guess 'Funeral Blues' by W.H. Auden. I think it was Auden....”

“There are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children.”

“No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Gre...”