Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.

What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.

I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation

A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs.

Reading is not an operation performed on something inert but a relationship entered into with another vital being.

There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning's books. Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.

To divide one's life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.