There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest

The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.

Everybody thinks of others as being excessively human, with all the frailties and crotchets appertaining to that curious condition. But each of us also seems to regard himself as existing on a detached plane of observation, exempt (save in moments of avid crisis) from the strange whims of humanity en masse.

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.

There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

Religion is an attempt, a noble attempt, to suggest in human terms more-than-human realities.