"He realized, in that footstep-haunted silence, that he no longer understood his life, or what it might become, and he thought for the second time that day that there might not be very much more of life to understand." Prologue, p. 16

"Man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of a creature it really was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away." Chapter 1, p. 19

"If you gave ordinary people a voice, and enough time to use it, an everyday poetry flowed movingly from them." Chapter 1, p. 81

"To skulk and to hide was a dishonorable life. He felt, very often in those years, profoundly ashamed. Both shamed and ashamed." Chapter 3, p. 147

"He was trying to defend the book against the burners of books. These small battles of the bookish seemed like tragedies at a time...