Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.

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.

Nothing's scarier than having a sick child, and one so newly born, and so vulnerable. It's the worst thing for a parent.

We die a day at a time

Just me, my music, and the voices in my head.

What the eyes had seen could not be erased.

Yet, ironically, it is her very wretchedness that makes me pity her so. I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know what to do!

If you don't care about quality, you can meet any other requirement.

New York City gritty committee pity the fool that act shitty in the midst of the calm, the witty.

I'd come to respect the bag.

I'm from the US of A. Born in Des Moines, raised in the New York suburbs.

The reason fat men are good natured is they can neither fight nor run.