What you don't know by heart you haven't really loved deeply enough

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.

There's something about putting on a pair of skates, and getting out there and moving like nobody else can. Freedom is a word that comes to mind.

You can exercise your authority as abeliever because you are seated with Jesus in the heavenly places.

All I cared about that summer were suntans, beaches, boys and booze.

It's wearying, like Caliban buttonholing you in hell and telling you the struggle he's having getting along with himself.

We always need to create and re-create but if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I'm a lot older than I was when I was 30, which is kind of hard to believe.

When I miss you, sometimes I listen to music or look at pictures of you, not to remind me of you but to make me feel as if I'm with you. It makes me forget the distance and capture you.

I kind of think that he [Prince] was pleased because he allowed [When Doves Cry] to be done.

Better to try understanding the sun than a woman.

The poison leaves bit by bit, not all at once. Be patient. You are healing.