We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

. . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?

She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.