“In England, coffeehouses were dubbed penny-universities, because for the admission price of one cent, a person could sit and be edified all day long by scholars, merchants, travelers, community leaders, gossips, and poets.”

“In this day . . . community has come to mean less a geographic neighborhood than a broader, sketchier network of colleagues and kindred spirits.”

“The one thing that is truly monstrous is the idea of another person being unreachable. I think this is what lies behind our fear of people we imagine to be evil: the belief that they are wholly beyond our reach, beyond our appeal and our compassion, because they have alienated themselves completely from the rest of humanity and thereby rendered themselves inhuman. . . . But there is mutuality involved. For us to accept another person’s alienation is simultaneously to alienate ourselves from him—to become complicit. When we decide to accept that another person is unreachable, we may cut him off, send him away, but we have set ourselves adrift as well.”

“Wally gives gifts all the time, at the drop of a hat, little, odd ones. The gift not so much in the item itself as in the transaction, the act of passing something along.”

“The involuntary poetry of one who is not fluent in the language.”

“Brant had said my embellishing constituted a disservice to history and its players. But I believed the opposite. Marooning them on the forlorn island of Only What We Know, a place whose boundaries were determined by the scant information provided by a handful of surviving documents, seemed the greater disservice. I paid homage with my imagination, and hoped I might get visitors to do the same.”

“Increasing pressure on students to subject themselves to ever more tests, whittling themselves down to rows and rows of tight black integers upon a transcript, all ready to goose-step straight into a computer.”