Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.

Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting... By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.

Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I'm quiet myself. I don't think I said three words the whole of graduate school.

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on.

People don't acknowledge loneliness in themselves, and don't appreciate its benefits, the reflection and attentiveness that come with it, the deepened acquaintance with oneself.

We have opted for petty determinisms - childhood trauma, genetic inheritance, social conditioning, etc. - that have made us comparatively passive. We seem to prefer to find excuses - which are really nothing more than the embrace of determinism, a sort of Stockholm syndrome relative to whatever we can claim as limitation. I am fascinated by the more enabling self-understanding. It has helped me to find my way out of the cloying comforts that are offered by prevalent psychological models.

The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous - dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this.