There is no way for even the most honest among us to look into memory’s dreamy, evasive eyes and know she can be persuaded not to lie, not to betray.

The decision to speak out is the vocation and lifelong peril by which the intellectual must live.

You can reconstruct the picture from chaos and memory’s ruins.

I happen to like household chores and resent them only when performing them makes it difficult for me to fulfill my professional duties.

Springtime is a season we tend to forget as we grow older, and yet far back in our memories, like the landscape of a country visited long ago, it’s always there.

There is only one history of any importance, and it is the history of what you once believed in, and the history of what you came to believe in.

I heard the military bands playing with false and terrible cheer in the streets as the recruits went off to war [WW1]. I had beat the bed with my fists then, and cried tears of rage that young men must march off to this artful ad calculated accompaniment to places where wagon roads would be laid across their bones.

The puritanical conscience is the coldest and cruelest of all the self-flagellating consciences to bear, for it stamps the sweet abandon out of life entirely. .... The puritanical conscience, with its little grey bonnet tied under its chin....

Words are shallow troughs for the deep water of the mind and it is only the fierce, the living, the simple, the clear, the angry mind which can overflow the troughs and go out over the mud, and over the grass, bearing the light of the sun on it like an angry shield.

Your body is a jewel box.....the jewel is your soul