Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.

A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.

Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others.

One reads thousands of books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of people. What remains of it all is hard to tell.

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

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.

The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance.