Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding

Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow.

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.

My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.