Life, after all, should go forwards, not backwards.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.

Paraphrase, in the sense of summary, is as indispensable to the novel-critic as close analysis is to the critic of lyric poetry. The natural deduction is that novels are paraphrasable whereas poems are not. But this is a false deduction because close analysis is itself a disguised form of paraphrase.

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

Jogging, I believe they call it. It seems to be an epidemic psychological illness afflicting Americans these days. A form of masochism, like the flagellantes in the Middle Ages.

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