What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.

I think that the best of my generation...have reversed the customary rules of the game and have grown more radical as they have gotten older - a disconcerting but healthy sign. To be sure, there are many youngish old fogies around and even the most illustrious of these, William Buckley, is blessed by a puzzling, recondite but undeniable charm, almost as if beneath that patrician exterior an egalitarian was signaling to get out.

my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.

It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.