The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.

Most full lives are filled with empty gestures.

Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

as the years go on a sense of deep patience comes over one; one seems to know the virtue of ripeness, and the danger of rushing events.

Ardent, intelligent, sweet, sensitive, cultivated, erudite. These are the adjectives of praise in an androgynous world. Those who consider them epithets of shame or folly ought not to be trusted with leadership, for they will be men hot for power and revenge, certain of right and wrong.

Power is the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one's part matter.