“If it's far away, it's news, but if it's close at home, it's sociology.”

“One of the advantages of defeat in life - maybe the main advantage - is that it provides an excuse for change. Defeat... invariably leads to new adventures.”

“Nations like individuals have to limit their objectives or take the consequences.”

“This was a great year for preventive worrying. Seldom in recent history have so many people worried about so many things that didn't happen in the end.”

“Nations like individuals have to limit their objectives or take the consequences.”

“People are always dying in the Times who don't seem to die in other papers, and they die at greater length and maybe even with a little more grace.”

“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...”