"In Gilgamesh the human formed from clay is a wild man, with flowing hair (possibly all over his body) and the strengt…"

"He saw in Falstaff...a debauched genius; a fathomlessly cynical, almost irresistible confidence man; a diseased, cowa…"

"This was the crucial moment in the development of the English language, the moment in which the deepest things, the t…"

"I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read."

"Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life."

"On the other side of anger at those who either peddled false visions of security or incited irrational fears of death…"

"Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructe…"

"A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure—an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to di…"

"The transformation was not sudden or once-for-all, but it became increasingly possible to turn away from a preoccupat…"

"Allusions to "hidden counsels" and "mysterious reasons" are almost always the mark of doctrinal incoherence."