A book can just be a description of a stick being snapped in half. If the reader is brought to feel the plight of the stick, well, you can imagine what that would be like.

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the troubles of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another.

Americans are genuinely and profoundly anti-intellectual. They are especially so in their pleasure-seeking, which is epically banal.

Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?

I'm an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor.

Different times and different structures make more sense at one point in life than at another.

It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.