The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

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.

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

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

The age of the book is almost gone.

The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.

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

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.