“Lifethe way it really isis a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse”

“For darkness restores what light cannot repair.”

“...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.”

“... Now to die of griefwould mean, I'm afraid, to die belatedly, while latecomersare unwelcome, particularly in the future. ...”

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”

“Man is what he reads.”

“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...”

“At times, Melete continued, it had seemed to her that this fact was what had created this behavior. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated ...”

“Dr Allendy said that it was necessary to become equal to life, that the romantic was defeated by life, really died of it, whether by tuberculosis in the old days, or by neurosis today. I had never ...”

“...for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.”

“Sometimes not speaking says more than all the words in the world.”

“Prince's words had not been meant as a warning. Rather, he had been playing. He had been pretending. He had been speaking for speaking's sake. Could there be a more despicable use for words?”

“Talk is cheap when your words are of no value”