Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be … when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am.

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.

PROCTOR, his mind wild, breathless: I say--I say--God is dead!

Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

Nevertheless, one learned very early that books had to be respected; they were all putative Bibles and to some small degree had a share in holiness.

The job is to ask questions - it always was - and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.