“A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.”

“I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?”

“Evagrius, presbyter, to his dearest son Innocent, greeting in the Lord. A word-for-word translation from one language to another obscures the sense and as it were chokes the wheat with luxuriant grass. For in slavishly following cases and constructions, the language scarcely explains by lengthy periphrasis what it might state by concise expression. To avoid this, I have at your request rendered the Life of the blessed Antony in such a way as to give the full sense, but cut short somewhat of the words. Let others try to catch syllables and letters; you seek the meaning.”

“One word came to mind: pee-yew. Evan tried to place the odor; it wasn’t a heap of decayed garbage or that of a spoiled fish. Truth be told, he smelled like rotten cheese.”

“What a night, I'm telling you. Odious. Odious with cherries on top.”

“Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old.”