“Human relationships are vast as deserts: they demand all daring, she seemed to suggest. ”

“I dare say she means to keep you from his attentions. Your honour demands she be slain.”

“If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.”

“Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection. We short-change ourselves. And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring.”

“A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.”

“The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.”