More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men.

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.

Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

Learning to be and learning to be creative are two sides of the same coin.

How we feel about our families teaches us and helps us know the importance of feeling.

Confidence imparts a wonderful inspiration to its possessor.

If you are fortunate in life, age and knowledge breed compassion.

Every morning when I wake up, I make up my mind to solve as many problems, before retiring home

Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.

Reagan "has conducted an arms race on earth," boomed Mondale. A race generally implies two parties. The Soviets contributed a little bit to this problem, if Mondale had not noticed.

Time doesn't go. Time stays. We go.

Without question, the notion of the doctor as a legitimate fee-for-service entrepreneur, making his fortune from misfortunes of his patients, is old-fashioned, distasteful, and doomed.

Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos — the trees, the clouds, everything.