“Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.”

“Books, I found, had the power to make timestand still, retreat or fly into the future.”

“It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future, and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.”

“Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.”

“I can look at my books with pleasure from a distance. Four feet is close enough.”

“Nothing is as far away as one minute ago”

“I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,icily free above the stones,above the stones and then the world.If you should dip your hand in,your wrist would ache immediately,your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burnas if the water were a transmutation of firethat feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,then briny, then surely burn your tongue.It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,drawn form the cold hard mouthof the world, derived from the rocky breastsforever, flowing and drawn, and sinceour knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.”