“If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.”

“Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.”

“History is the essence of innumerable biographies.”

“War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let t...”

“Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.”

“If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.”

“Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God's ways for us. We can have all the hell we want.”

“Freedom is an absolute state, there is no such thing as being half-free.”

“Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details.”

“Worry is the opposite of power.”

“I hadn't been able to trust since the age of four. I was torn between wanting to be cradled and telling the world to go fuck itself, and those were opposite sides of the same coin.”

“The basic principle of structural analysis, I was explaining, is that the terms of a symbolic system do not stand in isolationthey are not to be thought of in terms of what they 'stand for,' but ar...”