“[The Jews who roamed through Moscow looking for work] had a special kind of face … a special kind of whisper and a special kind of footstep … They were like hunted animals.”

“The degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.”

“A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.”

“A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.”

“The boy is special, Aunt Annie told his mother, and his mother in turn told him. But what kind of special? No one ever says.”

“Every woman needs a special friend of her own sex with whom she can 'have a haircombing' about everything from menstruation to male monsters, and Julie had become that kind of special friend.”

“The automatic assumption that everything a unionist does is wrong is not good for us. Like, how could everything that unionists do be wrong? I mean, they're not a special people. They're not a kind of special bad people.”

“The fact is that political stupidity is a special kind of stupidity, not well correlated with intelligence, or with other varieties of stupidity.”

“He had no special hobbies, but he needed luxury in general of a kind, and especially the luxury of getting things in a hurry, his theory being that everything comes to the man who won't wait.”

“Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. … The theory of special genius, according to which for instance, it is supposed that a musical genius should be a fool at other subjects, confuses genius with talent. … There are many kinds of talent, but only one kind of genius, and that is able to choose any kind of talent and master it.”