I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.

Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.

There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire's, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, "It is later than you think." But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.

Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader--it is never quite oneself. 2) I usually hate the sight of my handwriting--it lives too much and I dislike its life--I mean by "lives," of course, betrays too much!

In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.