“How many more, I must ask myself,such perfect ends of Augusts will I witness?”

“Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more.”

“Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.”

“He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a brook in a dirt road, he doesn’t know. He pictures a huge vacant field of cinders and his heart goes hollow.”

“The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. Sometimes, therefore, a door opens onto a hallway impossibly, and the placement of our heating ducts and storage space borders on the irresponsible. I have great trouble, myself, in imagining the floor plans of split-level homes, though I feel they are important sites of the American condition.”

“Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.”

“The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.”