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

“If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.”

“We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.”

“(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.”

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”

“I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.”

“The originals are not original, but that Emersonian irony yield to the Emersonian pragmatism that the inventor knows how to borrow.”