There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.

To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.

A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.

When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself

Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.