“What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists."[The Premise Of Meaning, American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]”

“The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.”

“Man depends on God for all things: God depends on man for one. Without man's love God does not exist as God, only as creator, and love is the one thing no one, not even God himself, can command. It is a free gift or it is nothing. And it is most itself, most free, when it is offered in spite of suffering, of injustice, and of death . . . The justification of the injustice of the universe is not our blind acceptance of God's inexplicable will, nor our trust in God's love, his dark and incomprehensible love, for us, but our human love, notwithstanding anything, for him.”

“If you commit yourself to the art of poetry, you commit yourself to the task of learning how to see, using words as elements of sight and their sounds as prisms. And to see means to see something worth all the agony of learning how to see.”

“What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.”

“A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off”

“You wanted justice ,didn't you?There isn't any...there is only love." - J.B's wife”