Quoting, like smoking, ... is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then ... I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard.

You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

As long as women are isolated one from the other, not allowed to offer other women the most personal accounts of their lives, they will not be part of any narratives of their own…women will be staving off destiny and not inviting or inventing or controlling it.

Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes; it suggests, further, a full range of experience…it suggests a spectrum upon which human beings choose their places without regard to propriety or custom.

The rare, delicate flavor of a life after retiring in one's sixties, whatever one has "retired" from, the pleasure I experienced beyond my job at Columbia, is a gift of life in the last decades. but it is not easily learned. . . . But sometimes, the only way to live is to get out, or at least seriously to contemplate getting out, doing the impossible,flinging the conventional tea.

Life has this in common with prizefighting: if you've received a belly blow, it's likely to be followed by a right to the jaw.