Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?

Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia.

It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.

Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.

In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.

In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.