"Memory is a field full of psychological ruins," wrote French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. For some that may be true, but memory is also a field of healing that has the capacity to restore the world, not only for the one person who recollects, but for cultures as well. When a person says "I remember," all things are possible.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event.

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectifications of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

There is no original truth, only original error.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.