“We read poems from the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse. Neil insisted on spilling wine over my carpet.”

“Reading The Waste Land, then, is in part reading about reading in the early twentieth century. The crisis in epistemology brought on by the discrediting of objectivity is especially relevant to understanding the poem, because the problem of knowledge is itself one of its major subjects. Like Joyce, Valéry, and other contemporary writers, Eliot consciously adds a dimension in which his work is self-reflexive, a dimension in which it refers to itself and its nature as a linguistic structure, a dimension which incorporates the larger subject of the crisis in Western culture into the process of reading. The Waste Land contains, in addition to its many other gifts, a partial set of instructions on how to read in the twentieth century. We believe and shall try to demonstrate that Eliot's poem, in one of its aspects, is a brief and striking primer, a McGuffey's Eclectic Reader for the twentieth century.”

“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread - and Thou.”

“The chief business of twentieth-century philosopy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.”

“Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.”

“Merlin: "Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit lately, I notice, of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish. I trust we are free of this?"Arthur: "Everybody knows that children are more intelligent than their parents."Merlin: "You and I know it, but the people who are going to read this book do not.Our readers of that time (...) have exactly three ideas in their magnificent noodles. The first is that the human species is superior to others. The second, that the twentieth century is superior to other centuries. And the third, that human adults of the twentieth century are superior to their young. (...)”