Given my age, I am pretty near the end, probably, of my career as a writer, a scholar, a teacher. And I wanted to speak of things I will not be able to do.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

The Horror Writers Podcast, horror is awesome check out them.

The word 'religion' takes on a sinister cast when one examines its root, religare, meaning 'to bind,' which in turn means 'to hold, to make prisoner, to restrain.

It snowed and snowed, the whole world over, Snow swept the world from end to end. A candle burned on the table; A candle burned.

I just don't think the Bob Costas, Joe Buck - I don't think that the people that rise to the highest - Jim Nantz, Mike Tirico - need a schtick. I just think Brent Musburger is really good.

It is not easy to free myth from reality or rear this fellow up to lutch, lurch with them in the tranced dancing of men.

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

Protecting biodiversity is just as important and critical to the survival of mankind as stabilizing the climate. Species protection and climate are interdependent.

I can't see myself without pink lipstick. I can go without it for a couple of days, but if there was no more pink lipstick in this world, I'd be useless. Seriously.

You’re not going to suck.’’ ‘‘Not at the guitar, anyway,’’ Shane said, deadpan. Claire punched him in the arm. ‘‘Ow.