“It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world.”

“Idle to pretend that we have lost paradise. We never had it; it is still to make.”

“Boredom comes simply from ignorance and lack of imagination.”

“المضحك أن ملايين ممن يتمنون الخلود لا يجدون ما يفعلونه في أوقات فراغهم !!(سوزان أرتز)Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves in their weekend.”

“I felt as if the world I lived in was only a facade - that beneath its skin, a darker world raged and rampaged. I'd glimpsed that world before, but I'd never known how vast and malignant it might be.”

“Who could be happy in a world of podiums and microphones?”

“Herman Melville is not comforting. Emily Dickinson isn’t either. Maybe their work is too hungry for comfort, or just too vivid for comfort. But Henry James is – profoundly so. Because he is tender. The tenderness is there in the structure of the sentence. He knows the way the poor and the dead are forgotten by the living, and he cannot allow that to happen. So he keeps on writing for them, for the dead, as if they were children to be sheltered and loved, never abandoned.”