Any experience deeply felt makes some men better and some men worse. When it has ended, they share nothing but the recollection of a commitment in which each was tested and to some degree found wanting. [...] The consequences of the journey change the voyager so much more than the embarking or the arrival.

The Communists offer one precious, fatal boon: they take away the sense of sin.

The fates have a way of demanding of a man that he suffer his greatest moments all by himself; being lone seems as often attendant upon reality as being in company is attendant upon the flight from reality.

By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.

To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.

To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that is has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.

Every social war is a battle between the very few on both sides who care and who fire their shots across a crowd of spectators.