“Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God?”

“But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight — matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.”

“I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit”

“There are few things more abrasive to the human spirit, even in Patagonia, than someone standing behind you chomping and sucking ice cubes.”

“A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself.”

“Always, my only hope and my only strength and my only way to cope has been an utter abandonment to God, knowing that if He doesn't work, if He doesn't move in the midst of us through His Holy Spirit, if He doesn't take my paltry fish and loaves and make it into more than it really is, I do not have a hope of making it. I relinquish my desire to control and yield this moment, this day and hope that He will show up.”