A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds.

I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best.

The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.

Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul.

There is nothing more humanly beautiful than a woman's breasts. Nothing more humanly beautiful, nothing more humanly mysterious than why men should want to caress, over and over again, with paintbrush or chisel or hand, these oddly curved fatty sacs, and nothing more humanly endearing than our complicity (I mean the complicity of women) in their obsession.