“listen, pal. I came here because I knew how worried you must be. But if you're going to talk to me like that, I'll fuck off home." The word racist brightened a little: the Anglo- Saxon was striking back against the Roman invader.”

“I have these guilts about never having read Chaucer but I was talked out of learning Early Anglo-Saxon / Middle English by a friend who had to take it for her Ph.D. They told her to write an essay in Early Anglo-Saxon on any-subject-of-her-own-choosing. “Which is all very well,” she said bitterly, “but the only essay subject you can find enough Early Anglo-Saxon words for is ‘How to Slaughter a Thousand Men in a Mead Hall’.”

“Why so profane, ask the bookclubbers? Because we are talking here about death, and fuck you if you don't like it: You're going to die, too. This is serious. Fuck fuck fuck.”

“...at seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words - don't know if it helped, but it made me more concrete ...”

“ALWAYS FULL OF QUESTIONS...How many times must I tell you, better to listen than to talk. But you're always talking...asking useless things...whatever for?""Because I want to know.”

“That it doesn't matter why I ran," he said, staring at me without blinking, "because I came back. I'll always come back, Luce. No matter how many rip-roaring fights we have and no matter how many miscommunications we have. I'll always come back because you're where I belong.”