And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.

I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.