A good critic is the sorcerer who makes some hidden spring gush forth unexpectedly under our feet.

No love, no friendship, can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.

If the flame inside you goes out, the souls that are next to you will die of cold.

Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.

That is the mystery of grace: it never comes too late.

Where does discipline end? Where does cruelty begin? Somewhere between these, thousands of children inhabit a voiceless hell.

The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling.

Doubt is nothing but a trivial agitation on the surface of the soul, while deep down there is a calm certainty.

A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again.

There is no accident in our choice of reading. All our sources are related.

A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.

If God were not only to hear our prayers, as he does ever and always, but to answer them as we want them answered, he would not be God our Saviour but the ministering genius of our destruction.

Patience is idling your motor when you feel like stripping a gear.

There is this of good in real evils; they deliver us, while they last, from the petty despotism of all that were imaginary.

Write what you feel. Write because of that need for expression.

I tend to integrate poet and scholar is by ironizing the scholarship. My hope is to disturb that space between the two so they can coexist in a kind of mutual uncertainty.

You can see the latest dumbness as just the end of a long line of dumbnesses that have been taking place for thousands of years.

Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing.

The red carpet we roll out come sizzling medium rare.

Sometimes it takes you awhile to get to it, but you always get there, and what you say is always worth waiting for.