If any era should be aware of the temptations to rewrite history, it is our own.

If you have a dog, you will most likely outlive it; to get a dog is to open yourself to profound joy and, prospectively, to equally profound sadness.

We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature's most moral act. At a time when meanings are manifold, disparate, and always changing, the rich possibility of interpretation--the happy resistance of the text to ever be fully known and mastered--is one of the most exhilarating products of human culture.

It's often the material things that provide the essence of memory.

Nostalgic memory is a sudden encounter with the thingness of the thing that has been forgotten, not the continuous desire for possessions, whether past, present, or future.