If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.

The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.

I was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran. I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened. The weight of the centuries lies on children, I'm sure of it.

Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.

... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.