I respect a man who can recognize a quotation. It's a dying art.

Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.

I'm a bit of a deconstructionist myself. It's kind of exciting - the last intellectual thrill left. Like sawing through the branch you're sitting on.

Language is the net that holds thought trapped within a particular culture. But if one could only strike the ball with sufficient force, with perfect timing, it would perhaps break through the netting, continue on its course, never fall to earth, but go into orbit around the world.

It was Adam Appleby's misfortune that at the moment of awakening from sleep his consciousness was immediately flooded with everything he least wanted to think about

To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another

Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one's peers.