“I have these guilts about never having read Chaucer but I was talked out of learning Early Anglo-Saxon / Middle English by a friend who had to take it for her Ph.D. They told her to write an essay in Early Anglo-Saxon on any-subject-of-her-own-choosing. “Which is all very well,” she said bitterly, “but the only essay subject you can find enough Early Anglo-Saxon words for is ‘How to Slaughter a Thousand Men in a Mead Hall’.”

“I liked reading about the nun who ate so dainty with her fingers she never dripped any grease on herself. I've never been able to make that claim and I use a fork.”

“But I don't know, maybe it's just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I'd go looking for the England of English Literature, and he nodded and said: "It's there.”

“Eric was usually pretty Anglo-Saxon about sex.”

“The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.”

“Ah, well, old girl, remember the definition of an Anglo-Saxon: A German who's forgotten his grandmother was Welsh.”

“...at seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words - don't know if it helped, but it made me more concrete ...”