 The age of the book is almost gone. |
| Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life. |
| Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence. |
| The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light. |
| The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion. |
| To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war. |
| Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent. |
| The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital. |
| There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness. |
| We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. |
| The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform. |
