In reading, one should notice and fondle details.

There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius.

It is nothing but a kind of a microcosmos of communism - all that psychiatry', rumbled Pnin ... 'Why not leave their private sorrow to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?

Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.

Stirless, I stand at the window, and in the black bowl of the sky glows like a golden drop of honey the mellow moon

Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.

Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool.