“To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.”

The unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.

Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss.

The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality… could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it.

For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal

All publicity works upon anxiety.

Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.

Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.

Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.

We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination

The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.

Sometimes God’s ways are not our ways. He may do something that seems unclear or even contradictory. We have to trust Him even when we don’t understand Him.

Those that differ upon Reason, may come together by Reason.

[H]owever hard the road, however difficult today, tomorrow things will be better. Tomorrow may not be better, but we must believe that it will be.

I’m just not a naturally cheery person. I’m naturally moody. I know that from people who spend a lot of time with me. People who spend a lot of time with me may not wish to spend a lot more time with me.

Art almost always has its ingredient of impudence, its flouting of established authority, so that it may substitute its own authority and its own enlightenment.

I may fall here in the Senate chamber, but I will. never make any compromise with any such men.

Beware the abuse of Power. Both by those we disagree with, as well as those we may agree with

Danger invites rescue. … The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had.