Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly

For most men, life is a search for the proper Manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.

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

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.

Reading to small children is a specialty.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

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.