“I've just finished reading Shakespeare's Sonnets, that is, I've read and understood them for the first time. One passionate, desolate lament - immeasurable and inconsolable - for the waning, wasting and passing of beauty. At the same time there's something disturbingly un-Christian here - the utterly heathen, desperate keening of the dirges, the grisly dances of death, danses macabres, in which death is nothing but the end, finality - destruction, not transition.”

“Every time I've done something in the community, each of the people that I've met, they're an inspiration to me. Their spirits are so high. What I'm going through on the field is nothing compared to what they're going through. Their issue is a matter of life and death. Just being able to put one moment of happiness in their life, that's something that I really cherish doing.”

“In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and loved makes better reading than something new and untried… nothing is so warming and companionable.”

“I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life.”

“I'm reading Our Ecstatic Days, by Steve Erickson. It's an extraordinary journey and the most exciting thing I've found since The Master and Margarita, which I've read about 20 times. I like being taken away somewhere by a book.”

“Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person…. Reading is bliss.”

“I'm wondering what to read next." Matilda said. "I've finished all the children's books.”

“Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?”

“I've read the scholarship that explains these verses 'in their context', and I think there's a fancy dance of evasion going on.”

“Finally there is nothing here for death to take away.”