Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.

Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.

The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.

The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.