“Our epoch does not love itself.”

Human beings disappear; their histories remain.

Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created.

When we were in the Dark Ages, it was a question of humanity somehow managing to forget about itself. We put God in the centre of society, and people forgot about their own nature and desires. There was a huge deal of repression.

Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.

Justice is a machine that, when some one has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.

The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself

Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicated to the sayings of Confucius.

The Forsytes were resentful of something, not individually, but as a family; this resentment expressed itself in an added perfection of raiment, an exuberance of family cordiality, an exaggeration of family importance, and the sniff.