Because of my mother, who gave me definitions, I knew what I was committed to in life. ... I had the most satisfactory of childhoods because Mother, small, delicate-boned, witty, and articulate, turned out to be exactly my age.

Your body is a jewel box.....the jewel is your soul

There is only one history of any importance, and it is the history of what you once believed in, and the history of what you came to believe in.

Ah, trouble, trouble, there are the two different kinds ... there's the one you give and the other you take.

The decision to speak out is the vocation and lifelong peril by which the intellectual must live.

Drink was the most fearsome of deceivers ... for it promised one thing and came through with quite another.

whatever devotion to something else there was in him had been made impure by church taken as a weekly, dutiful thing.