It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

Certain blood will be given for half certain reasons, as in all wars.

I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.

It is a joy to be choked with thought.

She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread.

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.