“Half an hour later, as I was deeply immersed in the story of The Man of the Hill, that curious, lengthy digression which seems to have nothing to do with the main narrative but is in fact its cornerstone..”

“It's curious that I can't stomach half an hour of television, in general, but I can spend the better half of an hour watching water fall from the heavens. Why do you suppose that is?”

“Jane Austen's narrative style seems to me to show (especially in the later novels) a curiously chameleon-like faculty; it varies in colour as the habits of expression of the several characters impress themselves on the relation of the episode in which they are involved, and on the description of their situations.”

“It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.”

“There is nothing that is not both narrative and language. Even the paradoxical physics by which the universe is held together is both. We are ourselves story, just as we are language. That is the nature of both narrative and love.”

“I have wrought my simple planIf I give one hour of joyTo the boy who’s half a man,Or the man who’s half a boy.”