The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.

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.

I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor futurelessens . . . . Superabundant existencewells in my heart.

We have to feed our loved ones, but at what cost. A dead man or woman can’t feed the living.

My mind corrupted but my heart is still pure

Fried twinkies? Paris nodded. Only once, I've never forgotten the experience. It's like heaven in your mouth, man.

There was very little art in my childhood.

I'm careful with my heart. I don't take crap from no one these days. I put my foot down. Being a woman, you deserve heaven and earth.

I've found that prayers work best when you have big players.

Every human being has creative powers. You were born to create. Appreciate your inborn potential.

Freedom of speech encompasses precisely the freedom to annoy, to ridicule, and to offend.