Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.

In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.

Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs and every song recalls a thousand sorrows and so they are infinite in number and all the same.

Anybody who has read any biblical scholarship knows that every scholar struggles over completely intractable problems with the original texts, or what they have to work from. It's one of the great, powerful, mysterious objects that have come down through history. This does not translate into literal interpretation for me.

There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?

It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.

The model for our early bankruptcy laws was Deuteronomy, the idea that, under certain circumstances - in Deuteronomy, it is simply the passage of seven years' time - people are released from debt, simply because they are released from debt. No more debt. You start over again. This has been a very powerful model in this country. It's being destroyed now. People talk about how much new employment, new wealth, and so on are continuously generated in this country.