Like twinned with unlike is beauty's shock. And beauty...is eternal. - Cynthia Ozick

The insight that the largest, deepest, widest imaginative faculty of all is what you need to be a monotheist teaches me that you simply cannot be a Jew if you repudiate the imagination.

there was a time when a new novel came out — let's take Saul Bellow — and it was a public event. And really, it wasn't just an elitist hobby. I remember — this goes way, way back into my early childhood — when Gone with the Wind was published, the world was whirling around this novel. I remember walking to school and seeing shopkeepers sitting outside their shops reading Gone with the Wind. This was an event. It changed people's minds. Maybe I have a yearning for that, though I don't see it would ever happen again. On the other hand, didn't we see that with Downton Abbey? So maybe it isn't all lost.

Sometimes repugnance overrides psychological curiosity, and sometimes psychological curiosity is no more illuminating than pornography.