The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.

Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.