Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

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.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

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.

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 Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

Before I could turn to look up, a voice boomed from the heavens: "What the heck is going on down there?

We owe it to the dead to dance on their graves.

Some people weren't made for love.

As the nicknames get shorter, people come closer.

Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.

Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.

All I want is to mess around, and I don't really care about, if you love me, if you hate me, you can't save me, baby baby, all my life I've been good

What is man? Ally of God or simply his toy? His triumph or his fall?

I was raised Irish Catholic, but I don't consider myself Irish Catholic: I consider myself me, an American.

Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.