“I began with the desire to speak with the dead.”

“Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.”

“What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books.”

“I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read. Much of the pleasure and interest of poetry depends on such attention.”

“Poems are difficult to silence.”

“They were an elite, living at the center of the world's greatest power, and one of their most cherished privileges was the cultivation of the life of the mind.”

“Libraries, museums, and schools are fragile institutions.”