Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you. - Harold Bloom

Hamlet, Kiekegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike — and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two — are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats.

Lucretius and his tradition taught Shelley that freedom came from understanding causation.