Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.

Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.

It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of mindlessness. The fixed is a Mason jar,and we can't beat it open. ...The fixed is a world without fire--dead flint, dead tinder, and nowhere a spark. It is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round the rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread.

Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.

Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.