Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

We all appear as dunces when feigning an interest in things we care nothing about.

That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realized it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is out chance to chose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it.

The true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end.

There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.