If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

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.

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.