“Most writers deserve the reputation posterity has bestowed upon them: You can’t for long conceal the toxic spots on your character—Philip Larkin is Exhibit A—nor can you conceal your dignity, your humanism, your regard for veracity and freedom.”

“Insecure or homicidal: the adjectives don't bother me one bit.”

“Most writers deserve the reputation posterity has bestowed upon them: You can’t for long conceal the toxic spots on your character—Philip Larkin is Exhibit A—nor can you conceal your dignity, your humanism, your regard for veracity and freedom.”

“For a time I hovered in that peaceful dreamland where nothing at all works properly but everything is okay.”

“I looked up fairness in the dictionary and it was not there.”

“We know by intuition and study that great books approach a condition both above and below human — what Lesser means by “grandeur and intimacy” — and our job is to place ourselves somewhere on the continuum between those shifting poles, to welcome a gravid agitation or be willing to undergo some form of personal torsion; to have our personhood both threatened and amplified.”

“Be sweet to one another. Stay in this beauty and brawl against the world's power of pulling apart. Recall Old Testament terminology: covenant, sacred, sacrifice. And mind always that Adam wasn’t a schlep fruitily duped by Eve. He turned his back on God because he knew that a paradise without her was no paradise at all.”