'Today's workplace design asks us to be permanently on call—and demands that we vanish at a moment's notice.'

Along Summit, a brick wall, two or three feet, separating sidewalk from yard, with an eminently sittable concrete top surface, on which are placed two lavender signs written in chalk and kept in place with stone paperweights: 'DO NOT SIT ON THIS WALL'.

(Obviously an interpolation by a frustrated rhapsode.)

'Nine days of drifting followed; but in the night of the tenth the gods washed me up on the island of Ogygia, the home of Calypso of the braided tresses, that formidable goddess with a woman's voice; and she received me kindly and looked after me. But why go again through all this? Only yesterday I told you and your noble wife the whole story here in your home, and it is tedious for me to repeat a tale already plainly told.'

'You almost want to write your own insane letter and publish it so that people will start sending you really crazy stuff.'

Annual visitors on a ladder outside my window: the cable guy unstealing cable, and the neighbor a few days later who steals it back again.

'The underground man writes as if he were thinking, but he thinks as if he were addressing others.'

'To say, when they are at work, "Let’s have done with it now," is a physical need for human beings; it is the constant necessity when you are philosophising to go on thinking in face of this need that makes this such strenuous work.'

'A dot-com address was considered crass.'