"Let me fuse Bacon, Johnson, and Emerson into a formula for reading: find what comes near to you that can be put to the use of weighing and considering, and that addresses you as though you share the one nature, free of time's tyranny." (p. 22).

"The people, not the college, is the writer's home." (p. 24).

"It sounds naïve, and yet Cookie's greatest power is to give us the impression, as we read, that here at last is the truth about human existence's constant blend of banal misery and tragic joy." (p. 41).

"Flannery O'Connor had the penetrating insight that religion for her countrymen and women was not the opiate, but rather the poetry of the people." (p. 54).

"Something very different [than the literature of perception and sensation] came into modern storytelling with the phantasmagoria of Franz Kafka, a prime precursor of Jorge Luis Borges, who can be said...