Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 - the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that 'Don Quixote' could do.

Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world. Yet from this lesson thou will learn to avoid the frog's foolish ambition of swelling to rival the bigness of the ox.

There's no taking trout with dry breeches.

When we leave this world, and are laid in the earth, the prince walks as narrow a path as the day-laborer.

There are only two families in the world, my old grandmother used to say, the Haves and the Have-nots.

For hope is always born at the same time as love.

Miracle me no miracles.