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

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.

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

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?

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

Freedom from likes and dislikes, the sudden sense of identification, the spirit of comedy.

I've found out so much about electricity that I've reached the point where I understand nothing and can explain no

And then there was the way you cast your gaze, A coldness so chilling that it could cause a fire.

Failure comes only when we forget our ideals and objects and principles.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

The psychology degree is simply that I was a chemistry major, and they kept wanting the correct answer, whereas in psychology you basically write whatever you want, and chances are you get a B.

I don't believe in anything, only in myself, but I respect all people who believe in something.

The hair is the richest ornament of women.

Beloved is man, for he was created in the image of God.