A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.

Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I stopped. ‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like— many years from now.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.