“Must one have a heart of stone to read The Ballad of Reading Gaol without laughing? (In life, practically no one ever gets to kill the thing he hates, much less loves.) And did not De Profundis plumb for all time the shallows of the most reported love affair of the past hundred years, rivalling even that of Wallis and David, its every nuance (O Bosie!) known to all, while trembling rosy lips yet form, over and over again, those doom-laden syllables The Cadogan Hotel?”

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”

“The Most difficult thing but an essential one – is to love Life, to love it even while one suffers, because Life is all, Life is God, and to love Life means to love God.”

“Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty.”

“When years have past
Over the fallen arch, the ruin'd hall,
It seems but course of time, the one great doom,
Whose influence is alike upon us all;”

“One day, to pass the time away, we read
of Lancelot—how love had overcome him.
We were alone, and we suspected nothing.
And time and time again that reading led
our eyes to meet, and made our faces pale,
and yet one point alone defeated us.
When we had read how the desired smile
was kissed by one who was so true a lover,
this one, who never shall be parted from me,
while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth.
A Gallehault indeed, that book and he
who wrote it, too; that day we read no more.”

“All love gets over, and we must get over it.”

“The most beautiful heart of all is the one that can still love even while it bleeds, and especially after its been broken into thousands of pieces.”

“Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper —
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.”

“I love Bach, I listened to him for 25 years, all my life, so I never get tired of Bach. And to learn Bach and play it is such a joy, even if no one ever hears it, just to play it sitting alone at home it makes you feel good, it's like a form of meditation. You can play it over and over and never get tired of it, it's a miracle. Bach I think is the greatest of all western musicians. Probably most people come to that conclusion.”