Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.

It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart.

A writer is in the broadest sense a spokesman of his community. Through him that community comes to know its heart. Without such knowledge, how long can it survive?

The two real problems in life are boredom and death.

It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.

People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.