Because a women’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.
We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.
Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.
Unbelief is a belief.
The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.
I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.
A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.
I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
I don’t think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
There seemed nothing to do but live.
Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him.
Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That’s what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded – God knows how – in making thousands and millions of individual human beings, lock well enought into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story.
Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wrong.
The highest type of intelligence, says Aristotle, manifests itself in an ability to see connections where no one has seen them before, that is, to think analogically.
The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.
There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.