The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

Fit for kings, formal gardens afford an earthly Elysium and the odd impression that we mere men might actually control nature for a time.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

small talk comes from small bones