Walter Duranty helped to turn the monster Stalin into a world figure and a hero of the leftistWestern intelligentsia by defending the bloodbath of the Soviet Union from its critics in the now famous: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction.

Over the years, he [Everett Dirksen] developed a style of infinitely subtle fustian, whose effect can still be remotely approximated by sipping twelve-year-old bourbon, straight, while reading Dickens aloud, in a sort of sepulchral purr.

Africa has a genious for extremes, for the beginning and the end. It seems simultaneously connected to some memory of Eden and to some foretaste of apocalypse. Nowhere is day more vivid or night darker. Nowhere are forests more luxuriant. Nowhere is there a continent more miserable

Everywhere you hang your hat is home. Home is the bright cave under the hat.

Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business.

The jumbo jet is the airborne equivalent of the interstate highway...One might as well be stuffed into a cartridge and shot through a pneumatic tube, like interoffice mail.