I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.

Pollution is everywhere, in that ancient Greek sense of miasma: guilt experienced as abject body fluid, moral pollution defining what kinds of beings count in social space.

Much evil must befall a country before it wholly forgets the Elves, if once they dwelt there.

Every now and then, a person must do something simply because he wants to, because it seems to him worth doing. And that does not make it worthless or a waste of time.

I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.

A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.