Name me any liquid — except our own blood — that flows more intimately and incessantly through the labyrinth of symbols we have conceived to mark our status as human beings, from the rudest peasant festival to the mystery of the Eucharist.

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.

By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

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

A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality.