“It's the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces”

“When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that liquid by whose power the flowers are engendered; when the zephyr, too, with its dulcet breath, has breathed life into the tender new shoots in every copse and on every hearth, and the young sun has run half his course in the sign of the Ram, and the little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open give song (so Nature prompts them in their hearts), then, as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, folk long to go on pilgrimages. Only, these days, professional people call them conferences.The modern conference resembles the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it allows the participants to indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while appearing to be austerely bent on self-improvement. To be sure, there are certain penitential exercises to be performed - the presentation of a paper, perhaps, and certainly listening to papers of others.”

“I've been in love with you for weeks.'There's no such thing,' she says. 'It's a rhetorical device. It's a bourgeois fallacy.'Haven't you ever been in love, then?'When I was younger,' she says, 'I allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while, yes.'What the hell does that mean?'We aren't essences, Vic. We aren't unique individual essences existing prior to language. There is only language.”

“As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with their nostrils barely protruding into the air of common-sense. They happily tolerated the existence of opinions contrary to their own — they even, for God’s sake, sometimes changed their minds. Their pathetic attempts at profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode. They liked to begin a paper with some formula like, ‘I want to raise some questions about so-and-so’, and seemed to think they had done their intellectual duty by merely raising them. This manoeuvre drove Morris Zapp insane. Any damn fool, he maintained, could think of questions; it was answers that separated the men from the boys.”

“Life, after all, should go forwards, not backwards.”

“Jogging, I believe they call it. It seems to be an epidemic psychological illness afflicting Americans these days. A form of masochism, like the flagellantes in the Middle Ages.”

“...my big depression. For six months I languished at the bottom of a deep hole, like the shaft of a waterless well, while kindly, puzzled people...peered down at me over the rim of the parapet and tried to cheer me up, or lowered drugs and advice in a bucket.”