Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

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.

Any act of violence creates resentment and resistance, because humans were meant to be free.

But I'll admit that he's kind of offensively delicious" "Like salt and vinegar potato chips" "Exactly

Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.

One-half of the ills of life come because men are unwilling to sit down quietly for thirty minutes to think through all the possible consequences of their acts.

Whenever I do a performance I always hope it is the best day of my life. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't.

We must make the invisible kingdom visible in our midst.

Resolved, to endeavor to obtain for myself as much happiness, in the other world, as I possibly can.

My lyrics say I have morals, I have confidence, I have weaknesses, I have strong points, that I am a human being.

Later, I would ask Shaya to help me compose a formal response to Katrice's letter, something a long the lines of "I am the Thorn Queen. F*** Off.

I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences.