In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.

Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.

All those layers of silence upon silence.

The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.

In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

We looked at each other. And it occurred to me that despite his faults, which were numerous and spectacular, the reason I’d liked Boris and felt happy around him from almost the moment I’d met him was that he was never afraid. You didn’t meet many people who moved freely through the world with such a vigorous contempt for it and at the same time such oddball and unthwartable faith in what, in childhood, he had liked to call “the Planet of Earth.