To learn a vocation, you also have to learn the frauds it practices and the promises it breaks.

I answered my father's demands for sympathy with silence.

Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.

Few things are worth doing perfectly.

After ages of bombast, the rhetoric of virtue has become ironic and shy.

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.

Everyone knows that (1) happiness is the goal of life, and (2) happiness is a chimera.