Language is memory and metaphor.

No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.

... we do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us.

For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.

to grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music and the company. ... the gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table.

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.

All writers who can claim to be called 'living' must be political in a sense. They must have what the Quakers call a concern to understand what is happening in the world, and must engage themselves, in their writing, to promote no comfortable lies, of the sort which people will pay well to be told rather than the truth.