Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, tuned the English tongue.

She felt like she'd slipped into another world. For the first time someone knew exactly what the hurt felt like.

Stand at the top of a cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down.

The affair made men feel larger than life.

What other country has had the privilege of making the world's heart beat faster?

Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

A bird is like an instrument working according to mathematical law, and it is in the capacity of man to reproduce such an instrument, Leonardo da Vinci

As much as Henry Kissinger wanted to attribute historical movement to impersonal forces, he too conceded to "the difference personalities make".

In neighborhoods like the oneI grew up in, places that are poor in proxy but rich in rhetoric, the hollies have a saying - I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six.

​A quiet heart is content with what God gives. It is enough. All is grace. Elisabeth Elliot

Books inspire a man to embrace the world or flee it. They start wars and end them. They make the men and women who write and publish them vast fortunes, and nearly as quickly can drive them into...

Stories were heirlooms in these parts.

the gods often mumble

As we went out for the golden dusk of the Byzantine streets, I reflected how strange that, even under the most extraordinary circumstances, during the most disturbing episodes of life, in the most...

Lovely thoughts came flying to meet me like birds. They weren't my thoughts. I couldn't think anything half so exquisite. They came from somewhere.

When I left Queen's my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don't know what lies around the...

Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we WERE there,...

But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine myself feeling at home in a place that is indifferent to what has become my true home, a land with...

It makes me wonder now, in middle age, if being spontaneous and kind and curious are all parts of our natural ability to swim.

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and...

There are reasons we congregate in these hot spots- to worship beauty and to feel its effects light up the electrolytes in the bloodstream.

There are songs that you play that you have to restart, and songs that you play that you never get right. But when a song is complete, there is no more you can do.