And nevertheless I have loved certain of my masters, and those strangely intimate though elusive relations existing between student and teacher, and the Sirens singing somewhere within the cracked voice of him who is first to reveal a new idea. The greatest seducer was not Alcibiades, afterall, it was Socrates.

The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions.

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.

the press is too often a distorting mirror, which deforms the people and events it represents, making them seem bigger or smaller than they really are.

Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.

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

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.