The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

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

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

It took 10 months for me to learn to tie a lace; I must have howled with rage and frustration. But one day I could tie my laces. That no one can take from you. I profoundly distrust the pedagogy of ease.

To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.

The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.

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.