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.

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

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

to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing

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

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.

It's the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces