“For a moment it seemed that her impeccably impractical education—in which she'd learned about Middle English and Duchamp's urinal and sub-Saharan droughts but had never been taught how to apply for a credit card or answer an office phone—wasn't useless after all.”

“Art is original. Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum.The second person to install a urinal wasn't an artist, he was a plumber.”

“i remembered the myth about Andromeda and how she had been chained to a rock by her own parents as a sacrifice to a sea monster. Maybe she'd gotten too many F's on her report card or something.”

“She'd been a hard taskmistress - How can you be a grown-up if you can't look after yourself? she'd challenged - but she had taught him what no Greek mother ever taught a son: the basic humdrum skills required for independence.”

“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’.”

“No, Belle needed him. He had to save her from a disastrous marriage. And then, he supposed, he'd simply marry her himself.John wasn't unaware that he was about to pull one of the greatest about-faces in history. He could only hope that Belle would understand that he had realized she'd had been right all along. People made mistakes, didn't they? After all, he wasn't some infallible storybook hero.”