We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while t...here is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inne...r self.... The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nitrates and phosphates for ammunition. The seeds of war. They're loading a full cargo of death. And when that ship takes it home,... the world will die a little more.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul... in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith with its store of food and little cooking pans and change of clothes,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great!... Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »