I don't think that someone who does not speak the original language can ever expect to produce a real translation.

Mandelstam was an artistic genius, the sort that any century produces only a handful of.

I suppose I do believe that the greatest art consoles a wound that it creates, that art can give you the capacity to endure and respond to the pain it forces you to feel. Psychological pain, I mean.

Wonder is the precondition for all wisdom.

We should be suspicious when God's call conforms so neatly to our own inclinations.

The endless, useless urge to look on life comprehensively, to take a bird's-eye view of ourselves and judge the dimensions of what we have or have not done: this is life as landscape, or life as résumé. But life is incremental, and though a worthwhile life is a gathering together of all that one is, good and bad, successful and not, the paradox is that we can never really see this one thing that all of our increments (and decrements, I suppose) add up to.

I don't think that someone who does not speak the original language can ever expect to produce a real translation.