A world ends when its metaphor has died.

We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.

Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.

The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.

The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.

Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fall but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced. Tropical beaches turned into high-priced slums where thousand-room hotels elbowed each other for glimpses of once-famous surf not because those who loved the beaches wanted them there but because enormous jets could bring a million tourists every year - and therefore did.