I'm afraid of life! There are times I--I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn't all a misunderstanding-- this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain... If...
I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?
I want to say to the literature teacher who remains wilfully, even boastfully ignorant of a major element of contemporary fiction: you are incompetent to teach or judge your subject. Readers and stude...
I talk about gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
I remember Aeneas’ words as I remember the poet’s words. I remember every word because they are the fabric of my life, the warp I am woven on. All my life since Aeneas’ death might seem a weaving torn...
I know who you are, she said. You're my enemy. The true believer. The righteous man with the righteous mission. The one that jails people for reading and burns the books. That persecutes people who do...
I don’t like making the rest of the world live in my dreams, but I certainly don’t want to live in yours.
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the...
Huge heavy things come and stand on granite and the granite just stays there and doesn’t react and doesn’t give way and doesn’t adapt and doesn’t oblige and when the huge heavy things walk away the gr...
How does one hate a country, or love one?... I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills...
How do I know, she said at last, that you are what you seem to be?You don't, Said he. I don't know what I seem, to you.
Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.
Hiç kimse cezayı kazanmaz, ödülü de. Aklınızı hak etmek, kazanmak gibi fikirlerden arındırın, ancak o zaman düşünebileceksiniz.
History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again.
His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate.
His efforts to break out of his essential seclusion were, in fact, a failure, and he knew it. He made no close friend. He copulated with a number of girls, but copulation was not the joy it ought to b...
He was very weary; the day had been long, and full of dragons.
He was clearly aware of only one thing, his own total isolation. The world had fallen out from under him, and he was left alone. To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, an...
He seemed not to know the uses of silence.
He keeps some goats, and a garden patch. In autumn he goes wandering over the island, alone, in the forests, on the mountainsides, through the valleys of the rivers. I lived there once with him, when...