l.

"We no longer have the learning of the ancients, the age of giants is past!"
"We are dwarfs," William admitted, "but dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of those giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see farther on the horizon than they."

"But often the treasures of learning must be defended, not against the simple, but rather, against other learned men."

"The life of learning is difficult, and it is difficult to distinguish good from evil. And often the learned men of our time are only dwarves on the shoulders of dwarves."

"Learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do."
-
"It would be atrocious," I said, "to kill a man in order to say bu-ba-baff!"
"It would be atrocious," William remarked, "to kill a man even to say 'Credo in unum Deum."
-
"A mirror that brings to life, for the imagination of the simple and sometimes even of the learned, the torments of hell. So that--it is said--no one shall sin. They hope to keep souls from sin through fear, and trust to replace rebellion with fear."
"But won't they truly sin then?" I asked anxiously.
"It depends on what you mean by sinning, Adso," my master said. "I would not like to be unjust toward the people of this country where I have been living for some years, but it seems to me typical of the scant virtue of the Italian peoples to abstain from sin out of their fear of some idol, though they may give it the name of a saint. They are more afraid of Saint Sebastian or Saint Anthony than of Christ. If you wish to keep a place clean here, to prevent anyone from pissing on it, which the Italians do as freely as dogs do, you paint on it an image of Saint Anthony with a wooden tip, and this will drive away those about to piss. So the Italians, thanks to their preachers, risk returning to the ancient superstitions; and they no longer believe in the resurrection of the flesh, but have only a great fear of bodily injuries and misfortunes, and therefore they are more afraid of Saint Anthony than of Christ."
"But Berengar isn't Italian," I pointed out.
"It makes no difference. I am speaking of the atmosphere that the church and the preaching orders have spread over this peninsula, and which from here spreads everywhere. And it reaches even a venerable abbey of learned monks, like these."
"But if only they didn't sin," I insisted, because I was prepared to be satisfied with this alone.
"If this abbey were a speculum mundi, you would already have the answer."
"But is it?" I asked.
"In order for there to be a mirror of the world, it is necessary that the world have a form," concluded William, who was too much of a philosopher for my adolescent mind.

I don't know what it is, but something about this book makes it stick in my mind. I'll be thinking about it a long while.

'As we walked through the rainbow haze of the neon-colored snow he pressed a small book into my hand.
– I received this for an oral favor I happen to have performed for a restaurateur friend. It’s a prayer book. Your need is greater than mine.
– You filthy liar! I cried when we had reached the streetlamp and read the cover. It’s an English-Greek phrase book, badly printed in Salonica!
– Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered. Study the book.
– And the English is execrable. F., you torture me purposefully.
– Ah, he said blithely sniffing the night, ah, it’s soon Christmas in India. Families gathered round the Christmas curry, carols before the blazing Yule corpse, children waiting for the bells of Bhagavad-Santa.
– You soil everything, don’t you?
– Study the book. Comb it for prayers and guidance. It will teach you how to breathe.
– Sniff. Sniff.
– No, that’s wrong.'

"Spring comes into Québec from the west. It is the warm Japan Current that brings the change of season to the west coast of Canada, and then the West Wind picks it up. It comes across the prairies in the breath of the Chinook, waking up the grain and caves of bears. It flows over Ontario like a dream of legislation, and it sneaks into Québec, into our villages, between our birch trees. In Montréal the cafés, like a bed of tulip bulbs, sprout from their cellars in a display of awnings and chairs. In Montréal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, 'The winter has not killed us again!'"