“Hamlet promised himself he’d throw down afterward, but I think perhaps when he said, “From this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” the limits of blank verse weakened his resolve somehow. If he’d been free to follow the dictates of his conscience rather than the pen of Shakespeare, perhaps he would have abandoned verse altogether, like me, and contented himself with this instead: “Bring it, muthafuckas. Bring it.”

“Who readsIncessantly, and to his reading brings notA spirit and judgment equal or superior,(And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?)Uncertain and unsettled still remains,Deep versed in books, and shallow in himself.”

“Why, then, do you think the white player might have done it?”Reynie considered. He imagined himself moving out his knight only to bring it right back to where it started. Why would he ever do such a thing? At last he said, “Perhaps because he doubted himself.”

“There were times when [he] allowed himself to see clearly that he would end his working life, that was to say, his conscious thinking life, in this task, that all his thoughts would have been another man's thoughts, all his work another man's work. And then he thought it did not perhaps matter so greatly... It was a pleasant subordination, if he was a subordinate.”

“it may happen that he sends a letter in verse, a mag-ni-fi-cent one, but which afterward he might wish to bring back with the tears of his whole life, for the sense of beauty is violated.”

“He’d never called her. Wanted to. A hundred times. But every time he thought about it, his mind boiled up with every reason not to do it, every doubt he’d ever had about himself.”