To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination. I no longer think of imagination as a thing to be dreaded. - Cynthia Ozick

(What moves you most in a work of literature?) Language as the well of image and feeling. Nabokov rather than Hemingway. If less is more, it is nevertheless also loss. And the easy vernacular is deprivation.

Metaphor is the reciprocal agent, the universalizing force: it makes possible the power to envision the stranger's heart.

Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are the planet's chief source and cause of torment. ("The Biological Premises of Our Sad Earth-Speck")