“Love is rarer than genius itself. And friendship is rarer than love.”

“When a man dies he does not just die of the disease he has: he dies of his whole life.”

“Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.”

“It has never been given to a man to attain at once his happiness and his salvation.”

“One must always tell what one sees. Above all which is more difficult one must always see what one sees.”

“A great philosophy is not a philosophy without reproach it is philosophy without fear.”

“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...”