“The physician had asked the patient to read aloud a paragraph from the statutes of Trinity College, Dublin. ‘It shall be in the power of the College to examine or not examine every Licentiate, previous to his admission to a fellowship, as they shall think fit.’ What the patient actually read was: ‘An the bee-what in the tee-mother of the trothodoodoo, to majoram or that emidrate, eni eni krastei, mestreit to ketra totombreidei, to ra from treido a that kekritest.’ Marvellous! Philip said to himself as he copied down the last word. What style! What majestic beauty! The richness and sonority of the opening phrase! ‘An the bee-what in the tee-mother of the trothodoodoo.’ He repeated it to himself. ‘I shall print it on the title page of my next novel,’ he wrote in his notebook.”

“The other day a patient told me that he had gotten into what was a very good college. 'It's not Harvard,' he said. 'Harvard's not Harvard either,' I answered.”

“Five of the most exciting words in the English language: "What shall I read next?”

“Hank Nearly was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat, with a book taken from the library, copied all the pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked passebly like the honest pages of business. He's make it through a three-hundred-page novel every two or three days.”

“Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.”

“I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.”