Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.
Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.
I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.
Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.
We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them.
Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
For most of us, art is supposed to do something more than simply mirror the confusions of the world.
Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults.
If we escape punishment for our vices, why should we complain if we are not rewarded for our virtues?
Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
Birth was something that came quite unexpectedly, and afterwards there was one child more in the house.
Always begin anew with the day, just as nature does. It is one of the sensible things that nature does.
Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Better the fragrant herb of wit and a little cream of affability than all the pretty cups in the world.
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
We lived our lives as if life was forever. To live one's life without a sense of time is to squander it.
It is easier to communicate with spirits than for one university department to communicate with another.
I believe that ideal character in its perfection is potentially in every man who is born into the world.
The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race.
Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
The war imbued my tin soldiers with quite a new interest. It was impossible to have boxes enough of them.
The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.
Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth.
My searing desire to atone for having survived helps me resist the temptations to join the world of lies.
I'm not much of a cook. I used to keep books in my gas oven - until someone told me it was a fire hazard.
The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.
He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
The difficult part of good temper consists in forbearance, and accommodation to the ill-humors of others.
I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.
It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.
Taste speaks through a turn of phrase, a curl of the lip, a shrug of the shoulder: it makes an atmosphere.
Half our mistakes in life arise from feeling where we ought to think, and thinking where we ought to feel.