There's a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.

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

Time at length becomes justice.

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

literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.

I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor arrives, a pilgrim is restored. A visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim.

History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.