"...First, in order to remember, something must be forgotten; second, the place where memories are stored has no boundaries. In other words, forgetting is a twin; its tandem effect is best called 'simultancous' distraction, the instant when one memory defoliates another. This fuzzy double - one devouring the other - presumably inhibits learning."

"The poets are supposed to liberate the words – not chain them in phrases. Who told the poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing. Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?"

"It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false."

"Her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it."