“A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.”

Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.

Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other–outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.

We read books to find out who we are.

All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge.

Listen.’ For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat… where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.

It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.

Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.

If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.

Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it.

When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.

I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

Hope is a slow business.

Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.

The closer the deadline, the more likely you’ll start thinking waaay outside the box.

You can check that box off. You want to make your parents proud for the tuition they paid at NYU.

You can’t think yourself out of a box that’s made of your thoughts.

Our generation delimited the definition & horizon of Love in a box that mainly refers to love between a boy & a girl.

The building is a national tragedy – a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.

Man has indeed become primarily a tool-making animal, and the world is now a gigantic tool box for the satisfaction of his needs.

If you have a government that is elected, they need to do the hard work – because if they don’t, they won’t be around the next time the ballot box is open.

When we started in television, there was that magic box in the corner of the room, and ‘Oh my gosh – look what it’s doing!’