"Aldous Huxley once said that an intellectual was someone who had found something more interesting than sex; in Indology, an intellectual need not make that choice at all."

"That was the other thing that drew me to India-the language. In high school my Latin teacher taught me Greek unofficially on Monday nights. I loved Greek; I loved the idea that there was another script. And then my Latin teacher told me there was a language that was even older and more interesting than Greek: Sanskrit. So everything started coming together-the art, the literature, the language."

"As the Hindu gods are "immortal" only in a very particular sense---for they are born and they die---they experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details...and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beings by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human being, however "archetypal" his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which we see our own faces."

"The culture-its excess-really suited me. I always liked Indian miniature painting much more than Renaissance painting. I didn't see what was so great about Rembrandt or Michelangelo. I liked paintings where there were 10,000 people in the scene and elephants and horses! I liked the carvings on Indian temples so much more than the simple architectural outlines."

"An array of puns, asides and (sometimes off-key) jokes makes the book more bulky and somewhat anecdotal, but also entertaining to read."

"The Bhagavad Gita is not as nice a book as some Americans think…Throughout the Mahabharata … Krishna goads human beings into all sorts of murderous and self-destructive behaviors such as war…. The Gita is a dishonest book …”"

"(Carmine Crocco) From having once been a peaceful shepherd, [he] had become the terror of southern Italy. [...] The usual occupation of Crocco's band was robbery of the wealthy Italians of the vicinity, battles with the Italian troops, and the seizure and robbery of rich foreigners, for whose deliverance heavy ransoms were demanded. When a detachment of troops was sent against them, they showed considerable courage. As they knew the country well, with its hiding-places and points of vantage, it was not easy to capture them."

"I am one of the endangered species: people who still write in meter and rime."

"...he must need wish in a hurry; and wish he did, that the black pudding may come off his nose."

"For out of every hole the rats came tumbling."

"There once was upon a time a poor widow who had an only son Jack, and a cow called Milky-White."

"You don't know what these beans are, said the man [that Jack meets]. If you plant them overnight, by morning they grew right up to the sky."

"My man is an ogre and there is nothing he likes better than boys broiled on toast."

"The sky is a-going to fall, I must go and tell the King."

"When the pig saw what he [the wolf] was about, he hung on a pot full of water, and made a blazing fire...and in fell the wolf..."

"Out the Old Woman jumped (of the window). And whether she broke her neck in the fall; or ran into the wood and was lost there...or taken up by a constable to the House of Correction for the vagrant she was I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her."

"Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, Be he alive or be he dead I'll have his bones to grind my bread."

"Kind sir, if the truth I must tell, At the sign of Basin of Water I dwell."

"Who says that English folk have no fairy-tales of their own?"

"Turn again Whittington, Thrice Mayor of London"

"Little pig, little pig, let me come in. To which the pig answered: Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin. The wolf answered to that, Then I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow the house down."

"But the Harp called out quite loud: Master! Master!"

"Well, he [the wolf] huffed, and he puffed, and he puffed, and he puffed and he puffed and huffed; but he could not get the house down."

"Fee, fi, fo, fum I smell the blood of some earthly one."

"Woe worth you, Molly Whuppie! never you come again Twice yet, carle, quoth she, I'll come to Spain."

"A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students."

"The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle."

"Men don't begin to live fully until their backs are against the wall."

"That's what makes his story so impossible, David. Because he's told me the truth. (Alma to David on Hector)"

"If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it fall, does it make a sound or not? Hector had read alot of books by then, he knew all the tricks and arguments of the philosophers. If someone makes a movie and no one sees it, does the movie exist or not?"

"I didn't say I was afraid of dying, I answered, I said that I was afraid to get on a plane. There is a difference. (David to Dr. Singh)"

"[G]overnments always need enemies, even when they're not at war. If you don't have a real enemy, you make one up and spread the word. It scares the population, and when the people are scared, they tend not to step out of line."

"For only the good doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place. The bad know they are good, but the good know nothing. They spend their lives forgiving others, but they can't forgive themselves."

"Every time my nose gushed blood, I felt like a little boy who'd wet his pants. I jumped out of the chair, pressed a handkerchief against my face, and hustled toward the nearest bathroom [...] How red the blood looked against the whiteness of the porcelain sink, I thought. How vividly imagined that color was, how aesthetically shocking. The other fluids that came out of us were dull in comparison, the palest of squirts. Whitish spittle, milky semen, yellow pee, green-brown mucus. We excreted autumn and winter colors, but running invisibly through our veins, the very stuff that kept us alive, was the crimson of a mad artist—a red as brilliant as fresh paint."

"April 1945. My unit was in Germany, and we were the ones who liberated Dachau. Thirty thousands breathing skeletons. You've seen the pictures, but the pictures don't tell you what it was like. You have to go there and smell it for yourself; you have to be there and touch it with your own hands. Human beings did it to human beings, and they did it with a clear conscience. That was the end of mankind [...] I'm sure you've read the stories about how some of them couldn't stop eating. The starved ones. They'd thought about food for so long, they couldn't help it. They ate until their stomachs burst, and they died. Hundreds of them."

"An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar."

"Every word is an abstraction or category, not a particular."

"The poetry I love is written with someone’s voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone’s voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified."

"The voice recognizes movements and pause, similarity and difference, recognizes and understands it in a mental and physical process."

"The poet is a particular kind of expert."

"Part of making a poem is a process of day- dreaming."

"An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond....a good feeling about his art."

"Each work of art generate its own rules"

"There are no rules but uniformity can make it seem as though there are rules."

"It is the nature of poetry to emphasize that the physical sounds of words come from a particular body , one at a time, in a particular order."

"That physical tingle, that powerful audible experience(not with poets projecting their work to an audience) but more intimate, less planned than that."

"A poem is free, and it shows its freedom by establishing its own principles."

"Craft is something you learn by studying models.When a student asks, what is a good book about traditional iambic verse, The Collected Poems of Ben Jonson. What is an excellent book about free verse? The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. What is a good book about short line in ballad metre? The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson."

"I am very interested in memorization which is the process of incorporating a poem, so, I would say the kind of poetry I write is the kind that emphasises the physical qualities of the words."

"I think what holds a poem like this together for me, if it’s held together, is largely meter; this one is in iambic pentameter and iambic pentameter whatever else it is, can be a very good glue. It is a very good way to hold things together. It’s like 4:4 you know."