The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.

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.

Think about it this way: While being married is about becoming the WIFE you are meant to be, being single allows you to focus on becoming the WOMAN you were born to be.

Destruction makes people go away so, if you hide inside destruction, you're safe

To Allah we belong and to Him is our return.

Some maniac butcher is trying to hack away your balls.

Take gifts with a sigh: most men give to be paid.

Oh for a seat in some poetic nook, Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook!

I think what you can’t see is always what you should be frightened of.

Everything distracted me, but most of all myself.

It's important to balance the drudgery with inspiration. It's a nightmare if you are just existing in the present project - you don't feel a sense of your own growth.

My library card. Every hurdle I've faced, I have researched my way over at a library. I'm grateful for that part of the American spirit that believes every citizen should have access to books.