Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.

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

The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.

Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

I prefer truth-based entertaining idealism.

You don't take a class; you're thrown into motherhood and learn from experience.

Let us therefore give ourselves to God with a great desire to begin to live thus, and beg Him to destroy in us the life of the world of sin, and to establish His life within us.

I don't know about you, but I call impromptu vomiting harm.

The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable.

At school I was an anti-magnet for women.

The greater part of instruction is being reminded of things you already know.

Take your f***ing tampon out and tell me what you have to say.

Every wall is a door.

Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.