Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of resto….

When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring..

Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious powers behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat’s back and drove it out….

I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted..

I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world..

The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphor….

The barbarians come out at night..

It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, w….

What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded--God knows how--in making thousands and millions of individual human beings, lock well en….

Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that….

Unbelief is a belief..

Machiavelli says that if as a ruler you accept that your every action must pass moral scrutiny, you will without fail be defeated by an opponent who ….

I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?'.

Perhaps we invented the gods so that we could put the blame on them. They gave us permission to eat flesh. They gave us permission to play with uncle….

Artists no longer starve in garrets. Some people may think this is not wholly a good thing, that being an artist has become too comfortable, at least….

Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: 'For what we are about to recei….

But it is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that….

The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light..

I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best..

As during the time of kings it would have been naive to think that the king's firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naive ….

It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what use….