The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured.

…notoriety is not real glory.

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

my great weakness: if a task was even mildly challenging, any sense of injustice drained away and I simply worked quietly until I was done.

Possibly it had occurred to him the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. [...] It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

I learned a little of beauty — enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth...

Let us not burthen our remembrance with
A heaviness that's gone.

History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.

Forget pleasure and Ambition

But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.

If you done it, it ain't bragging.

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

These artists pay little attention to an encircling present that bears no direct relation to the world of work in which they live, and they therefore see in it nothing more than an indifferent framework for life, either more or less favorable to production.

What you do is your legacy.