Inside a room on the third floor of the building, two men paced, deep in thought.  One, a wrinkled, portly man with a voice that gave the impression of a particularly intellectual whale, began to speak.

(From teen nostalgebraist sci-fi epic; I’m honestly not sure whether this was supposed to be funny or not)

There is no base score assigned to owning a mouse or washing a mouse that can confer an automatic rating of fit or unfit for duty.

Content note: This event is designed to provoke existential terror and involves staring into the abyss.

“To arrive at this parallel,” Werstine says, “Chambers had to equate a creature’s eating itself, which is hardly cannibalism in any sense of the word, to its eating another member of its own species.”

In his later years, his sense of humour blooms into a quaint richness that pleases everyone, but is without any malice.

We ministers of the nether world, from the highest down to the lowest, all have unbending iron natures and – unlike the officials of the mortal world, who are always doing kindnesses and showing favours and inventing little tricks and dodges for frustrating the court of justice – we are incapable of showing partiality.

What got the adrenaline going was the sense of urgency he felt when I’d asked him about verse-speaking, about the “iambic fundamentalism” for which he’s famous.

Botstein’s prolixity does not preclude conversational generosity: he compulsively credits you with making good points that were in fact his.

I imagine myself visiting Ethiopian restaurants and thundering: “I am a lover of the world’s foods!  I am a deeply serious eater!  If you can’t even make food that I would like, then who do you expect will eat this?”

A prig is one who delights in demonstrating his superiority on small occasions, and it is precisely when he has a good case that he rises to the depths of prigocity.