“Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones just as the wind blows out a candle and fans a fire.”

“We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.”

“We always love those who admire us and we do not always love those whom we admire.”

“Old men are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for being no longer in a position to give bad examples.”

“We give advice but we do not inspire conduct.”

“Few people know how to be old.”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”

“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...”