What was lost in the European cataclysm was not only the Jewish past--the whole life of a civilization--but also a major share ofthe Jewish future.... [ellipsis in source] It was not only the intellect of a people in its prime that was excised, but the treasure of a people in its potential.

Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are the planet's chief source and cause of torment.

We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

Of comic novels that have quaffed the elixir of 'classic': Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm.

It isn't the instrument that influences High-Minded or Low-Minded; it's the quality of Mind itself.