A good critic is the sorcerer who makes some hidden spring gush forth unexpectedly under our feet.

Did you ever have a conversation with someone who misunderstood everything you had to say? It's exhausting, and the ironic part is that the more you try and explain yourself, the more mixed up things become. Your best friend knows when you're kidding, venting, and tired. He or she knows you and therefore doesn't read into the things you say.

A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.

It seems that, after nineteen centuries of extraordinary glorification, the small Host for which so many cathedrals have sprung up, the small Host that has rested in millions of breasts and that has found a tabernacle and worshippers even in the desert - it seems that the triumphant Host of Lourdes and the Eucharistic Congresses of Chicago and Carthage remains as unknown, as secret as when it appeared for the first time in a room in Jerusalem. Light is in the world as in the days of St. John the Baptist, and the world does not know it

What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

The grandeur of man lies in song, not in thought.

I love Germany so much I'm glad there are two of them.