The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.

The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.

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

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

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.

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