Love cannot save you from your own fate.
No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.
Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.
The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.
Her book about the money in sex gives you the feeling of the sex in money.
But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight — matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.
There are moral religious people and moral secular people, immoral religious people and immoral secular people.
If you go to a desert, you will hear this mysterious voice: Be wise, protect your forests!
The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. [. . . ] First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever.
The monotony of staying in one place is the best thing for writing a novel. Having regular habits, a kind of security, but especially no big surprises, no shocks.
Phocion compared the speeches of Leosthenes to cypress-trees. "They are tall," said he, "and comely, but bear no fruit. "