The past is never dead. It's not even past.

My mother is a fish.

So vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind-and that of the minds wh…

Thou unrelenting Past! Strong are the barriers round thy dark domain, And fetters, sure and fast, Hold all that enter thy unbreathing reign.

We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.

'Wakefield' prefigures Franz Kafka, but the latter modifies, and sharpens, the reading of 'Wakefield.' The debt is mutual; a great writer creates his or her pr…