“The absence of symbols in our life debases it as much as any government can...”

“Even speech was for them was a debased form of silence; how much more futile is poetry which is a debased form of speech.”

“The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.”

“What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.”

“Some servent with no sense of the symbolic had kept the hinges well-oiled during the years of his absence,as if their marital life had merely been cast into temporary abeyance.”

“We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.(pg. 43, "The Unsettling of America")”