162 quotes
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
He shows the magisterial ability to keep talking, however busily he appears engaged in conjuring up a world, about himself.
We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
Bech, A Book (1970)
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
A Month of Sundays (1975)
Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)
He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
Couples (1968)
I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one.
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
I was twenty-four, and the religious revival within myself was at its height.
I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible.
The Centaur (1963)
Astronomy is what we have now instead of theology. The terrors are less, but the comforts are nil.
Man is an animal, but a social animal.
Buchanan Dying : A Play (1974)