'song alone escapes the greedy funeral pyre'

All our conversations go: why don't you read this book? - and there they stop.

'As it is, we've heard it all, seen it all too often, heard the promises, and they are like any words which have been gone over so much that they are worn strange. We don't laugh, we don't cry; and we don't laugh that we don't cry, and we obviously can't cry about it. That's funny.'

'In giving the entirety a higher value, the usual an element of secrecy, the well-known the value of the unknown and the finite the appearance of infinity, I romanticize.'

To a bus driver, the bus is always 'my bus'.

On the bus I spied the driver running his white ipod headphones down the back of his neck, underneath his stocking cap, to avoid detection.

'Defoe and Richardson are the first great writers in our literature who did not take their plots from mythology, history, legend or previous literature. In this they differ from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, for instance, who, like the writers of Greece and Rome, habitually used traditional plots; and who did so, in the last analysis, because they accepted the general premise of their times that, since Nature is essentially complete and unchanging, its records, whether scriptural, legendary or historical, constitute a definitive repertoire of human experience.'

- not written by a computer programmer.

'New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the labor. We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust: but we do not like your work.'

(singing) 'gonna eat your brains and gain your knowledge'