Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.
The engineering is secondary to the vision.
If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.
After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.
Death persecutes before it executes.
The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
What we think we are surely going to do, we don’t do; and what we never intended to do, we may one day notice that we have done, and done, and done.
The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.
Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
To desire to be what one can be is purpose in life. There are no exterior forces. There are only interior forces. Who squanders talent praises death.
Old saws have no teeth.
Awe consumes any brand that ignites it...
Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.
In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.
The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.
The ordinary is the divine.
There’s a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.
Paradise is only for those who have already been there.