It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about.

I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.

A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.

My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.

The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters

A gentleman doesn't have one set of manners for the house of a poor man and another for the house of someone with an income incomparable to his own.

The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.