“It's part of what we call the Shadow, all the dark parts of us we can't face. It's the thing that, if we don't deal with it, eventually poisons our lives.”

“You look at us and you see oppression; we see stability and harmony. You see corruption; we see ties of family, friendship, and mutual support. You see feudalism, we see mutual responsibility. You see the oppression of women, we see the defense of modesty.”

“Thus, although life is by and large unthrilling, when we do find ourselves in the sort of situation upon which thrillers dote we cannot really experience it, because our imaginations are occupied by the familiar tropes of popular fiction. And the result of this is a kind of dull bafflement, and the sense that whatever it is cannot really be happening. We actually think that phrase: this can’t be happening to me.”

“There are three kind of history. The first is what really happened and that is forever lost. The second is what most people thought happened, and we can recover that with assiduous effort. The third is what the people in power wanted the future to think happened and that is 90 percent of the history in books.”

“It is an animus, she decides, the representation of the Logos in the female, as the anima is the representation of Eros in the male. In its negative aspect it is opinionated, conventional, banal, self-righteous, argumentative . . . In its positive aspect, it conveys spirit, feistiness, the capacity for reflection and self-knowledge, the capacity to handle philosophical and religious ideas at the higher levels.”

“But it turns out that people who are grounded and secure don't change much under stress. That's what being grounded means.”

“Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives?”