“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.”

“Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.”

“All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.”

“Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.”

“Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”