“Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison.”

The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.

When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.

That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?

We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.

It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.

The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother.

What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.

You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

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.

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

To rankling poison hast thou turned in me the milk of human kindness.

One drop of hatred left in the cup of joy turns the most blissful draught into poison.

There are evil spirits who suddenly fix their abode in man’s unguarded breast, causing us to commit devilish deeds, and then, hurrying back to their native hell, leave behind the stings of remorse in the poisoned bosom.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

The world is poisoned with erroneous theories, and needs to be taught sane doctrines, but it is difficult to straighten what has become crooked.

Her heart beats with rhythms of sanity mingled with darkness and fierce brutality, she is elixir of life’s poison.

After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.

I’m glad that the fact that people are still getting poisoned by pesticide drift is gaining attention.