“Stories rarely begin at the beginning, but every storyteller has to begin somewhere, and Anna chooses to start this story with shame.”

“Every good story-teller nowadays starts with the end, andthen goes on to the beginning, and concludes with themiddle...”

“Every story has a beginning and an end. What lies between those two points is the journey.”

“Once upon a time . . .” “In the beginning was . . .” That’s the way it always starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives’ tale blues riff begins with “Woke up this mornin’. . . .”

“Israel's monomaniacal Spinoza worship is amusing and exasperating by turns. For a start, his insistence that Spinoza was the singular font of the Enlightenment leaves him without a story of the Enlightenment's intellectual or cultural origins. Every historian has to begin somewhere, but the fact that Israel begins with Spinoza, and then reduces most of what follows the philosopher to a footnote, leaves his account of the Enlightenment founded on something like immaculate conception.”

“I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.”