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

To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.

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

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

Fischer does not merely outplay opponents; he leaves them bodily and mentally glutted. Fisher himself speaks of the exultant instant in which he feels the 'ego of the other player crumbling.'

The age of the book is almost gone.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity