“Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.”

“I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.”

“A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.”

“Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.”

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot....”

“How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! As tho’ to breathe were life!”