Jed Perl writes precisely and ecstatically. Antoine' s Alphabet is a history and a fairy tale, a work of criticism, and a work of art.

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.

The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.

His voice was handsome and broken, like a cobblestone street.

To feel alone is to be alone.

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.

When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.

You can control the visibility of my name and my popularity, but you cannot control the frequency at which people are quoting me. Truth always rises with time.

Being Overconfident often exists when one tries to cover up one's insecurities without facing them.

He means to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow.

The talkers are rising above the thinkers.

Most problems are caused by solutions.

It's not so much wanting to die, but controlling that moment, choosing your own way.

That's the thing about conspiracy theories: in a comforting sort of way, they give rise to the feeling that someone, somewhere, knows what's going on.

No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.

You can be in this business 50 years and still not know anything about it.

Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell of dying moons and shadows.