"He went out of the office into the darkness of the long corridor and walked heavily into the sunlight, into the open world that was like a prison wherever he turned."

“Sometimes he stood in the center of the quad, looking at the five huge columns in front of Jesse Hall that thrust upward into the night out of the cool grass. ... Grayish silver in the moonlight, bare and pure, they seemed to him to represent the way of life he had embraced, as a temple represents a god.”

“A necessary strategy of literary criticism is to propose problems, and a necessary illusion is that those problems can be solved. But the problems and solutions are more often than not celebrations of the literature they address and gestures that would bring us closer to a past that is forever receding from us. The force of literature is at last magical, and the mysteries that we try to solve are the validations of its power.”