This novel is dedicated to Wabash College—its men, its faculty, and its legacy
Mean while the Mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does straight its resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green Thought in a green Shade.
—Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden”
Of possessions
cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting,
and tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses,
but a man’s life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted
nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth’s barrier.
—Achilles in Homer’s The Iliad,
Book IX, 405–409
A bitter heart that bides its time and bites.
—Caliban in Robert Browning’s
“Caliban upon Setebos”