The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.

The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.

Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in a politics of sex.

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.

The ordinary is the divine.