The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself

nothing is slower than the true birth of a man

Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.

The American child, driven to school by bus and stupefied by television, is losing contact with reality. There is an enormous gap between the sheer weight of the textbooks that he carries home from school and his capacity to interpret what is in them.

I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.

Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death. ... Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact that he had been.

Men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself.