What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one’s own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.
Reading is not an operation performed on something inert but a relationship entered into with another vital being.
The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.
We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.
My son is 7 years old. I am 54. It has taken me a great many years to reach that age. I am more respected in the community, I am stronger, I am more intelligent and I think I am better than he is. I don’t want to be a pal, I want to be a father.
There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning’s books. Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.
Reading to small children is a specialty.
Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.
There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
Wine is a civilizing agent.
The drinking of wine seems to me to have a moral edge over many pleasures and hobbies in that it promotes love of one’s neighbor.
To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.
The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.
By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one.
A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk’s leap toward immortality.
My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat.
I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation.
Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly.
Cheese is milk’s leap towards immortality.
An aphorism can contain only as much wisdom as overstatement will permit.
We all die uneducated. But at least we will not feel quite so lost, so bewildered. We will have disenthralled ourselves from the merely contemporary. We will understand something – not much, but something – of our position in space and time.