If she could go back in time and take a lover from history it would be Donne. Not Keats, the knowledge of his untimely death would color everything quite wretchedly. That was the problem with time travel, of course (apart from the impossibility)—one would always be a Cassandra, spreading doom with one’s foreknowledge of events. It was quite wearyingly relentless but the only way that one could go was forward.

Let other Bards of Angels sing,

Bright Suns without a spot; 

But thou art no such perfect Thing; 

Rejoice that thou art not!

What I am trying to say is that I love my work. I love movies, I love to see movies, I love to write about movies, I love to talk about movies, I love to go through them a frame at a time in the dark with a room full of people watching them with me and noticing the most extraordinary things… . . 

Too many moviegoers look at movies and do not see them, but then it has always been that way. Movies are a time-killer or a casual entertainment for most people, who rarely allow themselves to see movies that will jolt them out of that pattern. The jolting itself seems unpleasant to them. I’m not a snob about that; anyone who enjoys a movie is all right in my book. But the movies don’t top out; as you evolve, there are always films and directors to lead you higher, until you get above the treetops with Ozu and F. W. Murnau, Bresson and Keaton, Renoir and Bergman and Hitchcock and Scorsese. You walk with giants.

One of our grandchildren told me the other day that he knew why I didn’t like White Chicks. It was, he said, “because you’re not a kid. If you were a kid, you’d know how funny it was.” “Yes,” I said, “no doubt you’re right. But if you were me, you’d know how bad it is.” “But I’m not you,” he said. “No, but you will be someday,” I said. “I started out as a kid, and look how far I’ve come.”

When you read a book, sir, and a more agreeable idea suddenly strikes your imagination, your soul straight away pounces on it and forgets the book, while your eyes mechanically follow the words and the lines; you come to the end of the page without understanding it, and without remembering what you have read.—This comes from the fact that your soul, having ordered its companion to read to it, did not warn it of the brief absence on which it was about to embark; as a result, _the other_ continued to read weven though your soul was no longer listening.

One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being. This thought deserves to be taken very much to heart.

We rank our friends in order of their intelligence. Then we rank them in order of their melancholia, and wonder if there’s a correlation. Then we rank them according to their _punctuality_, cross-referencing our results with our previous findings.

When I think about future generations I think it would be nice, it would be a justification, among others, for my having lived the life I have lived, but I never imagine them thinking about William Maxwell the twentieth-century novelist; only about this or that book, which it would make me happy to think that they are as moved by, as moved as a present-day reader, because that would mean I had got my hands on something that is a constant of human life.