... one doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity nothing, whatever collectivity it purports to advance or at least represent.

The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.

More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men.

I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.

What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.