For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms. Only in space are events and objects and people unique and significant-and therefore beautiful. A tree has significance if one sees it against the empty face of sky. A note in music gains significance from the silences on either side. A candle flowers in the space of night. Even small and casual things take on significance if they are washed in space, like a few autumn grasses in one corner of an Oriental painting, the rest of the page bare.

The world has been forced to its knees. Unhappily, we seldom find our way there without being beaten to it by suffering.

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.

Rivers perhaps are the only physical features of the world that are at their best from the air.

The nice thing about really intelligent people is that when you talk with them they make you feel intelligent too.

the issue of war or peace is an issue that concerns not only experts on Foreign Affairs but every citizen of the United States.

It is a difficult lesson to learn today-to leave one's friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week. And yet, once it is done, I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.