Deciding what is being talked about is a kind of interpretive bet.

How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!

The followers must feel besieged.

Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn.

Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossibe courses are given. The school's aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.