Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.

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.

Where are Haldad my father, and Haldad my brother? If the king of Doriath fears a friendship between Haleth and those who have devoured her kin, then the ways of the Eldar are strange to Men.

We are such stuff As dreams are made on and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

Empathy is the antidote to shame.

Procrastination is your body telling you you need to back off a bit and think more about what you are doing.

How can you seperate those things though? The people are the place is the people.

I'm horrified most of the time. I wish it was more complicated, but at the same time, each time I try to complicate it I hate it because I hate the idea of writing to impress.

It hurts, as if someone took a part of me, tore it out, mercilessly stomped all over and threw it out.

Probably never in human history did we live in a society in which, at the microlevel of personal behavior, our lives were so strongly regulated.

The voice you believe will determine the future you experience

However softly we speak, God is near enough to hear us.