We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

Days and nights passed over this despair of flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain - perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream.

We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.

Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.

My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.