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

One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.

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

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.

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.

Wine is a civilizing agent.