Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.

The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.

Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is a wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English. Mead has discovered an original and highly personal way to make herself an inhabitant both of the book and of George Eliot's imaginary city. Though I have read and taught the book these many years I find myself desiring to go back to it after reading Rebecca Mead's work.

I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.

What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.