You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-obje ct look.

The closest modern equivalent to the Homeric hero is the ace fighter pilot.

A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.

Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.

The nightingales are sobbing in The orchards of our mothers, And hearts that we broke long ago Have long been breaking others; Tears are round, the sea is deep: Roll them overboard and sleep.