A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa. . . . Odessa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both.

I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.

Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

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