Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.

Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.

One can imagine a world without essays. It would be a little poorer, of course, like a world without chess, but one could live in it.

Reasons always came with a purpose, to give the appearance of a struggle between principle and desire. Principle had power only until you found what you had to have.

I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.

We are made to persist. that's how we find out who we are.

Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he'd led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity - its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.