“Don't tell me you're reading it,' she said, as if I were doing something to the book, whereas in fact the book was doing something to me.”

“The essay is a modest genre. It doesn't mean to change the world. Instead it says: let me tell you what happened to me.”

“...my thoughts don't really bump along this way, but they do bump somehow, and it's more honest--more pedagogically useful, more truthful--to arrange them in a loose, disconnected, provisional way than to deliver only the conclusions.”

“If life were a sea adventure, I knew: I wouldn't be sailor, pirate, or cabin boy but more likely a barnacle clinging to the side of the boat.”

“No doubt he is more than that, but we have no time to inquire.”

“They are suspicious of humanism, nervous about too much style, and wary of public celebrations of the personal.”

“And found there one of those huge comprehensive anthologies of literature, the sort of thing which, on a bad day, can induce an inferiority complex...”