A poem is a construction of inner space. Language is to inner space as light is to material space.

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.

Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.

A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.

If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I value the specific contents.

If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

I read books to read myself.

The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself.

Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. ‘There’ was then; ‘here’ is now.

Where am I when I am involved in a book?

Do you not see the Madonna always beside the tabernacle?

Once she kissed me, my heart slowed, and every muscle in my body relaxed. How much I needed her terrified me. -pg 252/ARC

The moon is my fear.The sun is my heart afire.The stars, my love songs.

If you truly love someone You don’t need to be faithful It will just happen.

Sure, this will probably end up being another in a long line of emotionally crippling misadventures...but let's try to have some fun along the way.

Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron. Here is a book [The Lord of the Rings] which will break your heart."

I think Juan stopped short - he got halfway to the destination and got off the train. He is certainly an excellent writer and a good person, but I'm not a nationalist.

Most of us could stop doing something that's hindering our passion for Jesus and effectiveness in following him.

Besides one should not believe that the people only want reading that is easy to absorb.

Their moral influence will then do infinitely more to advance the true interests of religion, than any measures which they may call on Congress to enact.