The letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction. Text subverts the absolutely vital role of memory.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.

Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.