Why were Jack and his brother digging post holes? A fence there would run parallel to the one that already enclosed the farmyard. The Welches had no animals to keep in or out – a...

It’s where we’re nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it’s for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some...

To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.

The reassuring smile was now useless. I was plastic. Everything was veiled. Objectivity, facts, hard information–these were things only in the outline stage. There was nothing tying anything together yet, so the mind built up...

No man voluntarily expresses his opinion without some intent to make a difference, and even if he does, he shouldn’t.

I sometimes think that I don’t have a purpose in this world. I am simply useless and wandering.

Already, in the last few decades, you have realized the utter futility of of encumbering yourselves with superfluous possessions that have no useful virtue, but which, for various sentimental reasons, you continue to hoard, thus...

. . .our whispered words, faintly in the darkness, dissolvingwithin the trees—then, fleeting words of consolationwould not suffice if feigned, and flippant wordsconfessed reluctance—our wordswere meaningless uttered on the wind. . .

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.All art is quite...

Powerlessness is an excruciating pain; it is torture insurmountable.