Quotes

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books--setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them. I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books.

I want to be remembered less as a poet than as a friend; let someone recall a verse of [Robert Frost] or of Dunbar or of the nameless Saxon who at midnight saw the shining tree that bleed the Cross, and let him think he heard it for the first time from my lips.

Philosophy springs from our perplexity.

When I began to lose my sight, the last color I saw, or the last color, rather, that stood out, because of course now I know that your coat is not the same color as this table or of the woodwork behind you--the last color to stand out was yellow because it is the most vivid of colors. That's why you have the Yellow Cab Company in the United States. At first they thought of making the cars scarlet. Then somebody found out that at night or when there was a fog that yellow stood out in a more vivid way than scarlet. So you have yellow cabs because anybody can pick them out. Now when I began to lose my eyesight, when the world began to fade away from me, there was a time among my friends . . . well they made, they poked fun at me because I was always wearing yellow neckties. Then they thought I really liked yellow, although it really was too glaring. I said, "Yes, to you, but not to me, because it is the only color I can see, practically!" I live in a gray world, rather like the silver-screen world. But yellow stands out.

[his view of the human condition] We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting the thoughts of others, and--every so often--glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.