A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

Children tend to be rather better observers of adults' characters than adults are of children's, because children are so dependent on adults that it is very much in their interest to discover the weaknesses of their elders.

Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.

The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.

The importance of these [college] years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him.

All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.