All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.

Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.

Reading is performance. The reader--the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk--performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.

When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.

Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.

That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.