“Think how much less stupefying the last fifty years might have been if people had actually read Marx.”

“The dawn that Anna feared might never come would appear on schedule, just as it always had - and after it another, and another. And yesterday would become Last Month, then Last Winter, then Last Year, then Two and Five and Ten Years Ago, and one day the people would have to stop and think before they could say how long ago it was ...”

“She had been a teenager once, and she knew that, despite the apparent contradictions, a person's teenage years lasted well into their fifties.”

“If the afternoon had been blue,there might have been less desire.”

“I may have been dead for the past hundred and fifty years, Susannah,...but that doesn't mean I don't know how people say good night. And generally, when people say good night, they keep their tongues to themselves.”

“In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.”