“I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me.”

“Miss Remy, I don't know what kind of signals you are trying to give me, but the more you challenge me, the sexier I find you.”

“Darby, sir, but Janus they call me,” the seaman said, “on account of a surgeon we shipped in the Sophie, a learned bloke, saying I saw both ways like some old Roman cut-up by that name.”

“Your case gives me new hope," I said to him. "With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that has just appeared and I find myself reading the same book I have read a hundred times.”

“the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense.”

“...sentences swallowed and sung back and swallowed all over again. She was made entirely out of words.”