It is silly to call fat people "gravitationally challenged", a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.

Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.

Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.

I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.