“he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.”

“It's quite possible we may actually be looking at some kind of super-sanity here. A brilliant new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century...He creates himself each day. He sees himself as the lord of misrule and the world as a theatre of the absurd.”

“For a real glimpse into an almost vanished world, one should look...at a scorpion who so obviously has no business lingering into the twentieth century. He is not shaped like a spider and he has too many legs to be an insect. Plainly, he is a discontinued model--still running but very difficult, one imagines, to get spare parts for.”

“It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser, though he has lost and I think that is the lesson of tragedy.”

“The imprint of Miss Hepburn is absolutely, totally present. Like it or not, she will be the most important look of the twentieth century.”

“Many cases of twentieth-century American map geekdom, it seems, began the same way that many twentieth-century Americans began: conceived in the backseats of Buicks”