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.

You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.

Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.

I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind.

To reject censorship after studying the risks involved is very well. To reject it ex cathedra, in the tones of Calvin pronouncing a dogma, eyes and mind closed to the possible consequences, the even marginally possible, is to make things too comfortable for oneself.

Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses.

The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.