"Should society be blamed for Pushkin?" I wasn’t aware there was blame to be placed…

"Society would be far better off." …if we spent all of our time discussing the differences between Pushkin, Baratinsky, Ryazinsky, and Lermontov.

"Does this reflect reality?" Metaphysical contemplation of the clock.

"We are going to beat it to death, but still it will survive." Plan of action for a poem.

"I’m just trying to sound as native as I can. False pretense…"

"[The 19th century] is such an idiotic notion." Erasing whole centuries in a single bound.

"… the last moment in which people retained some degree of sanity." The 19th century, which we just abolished.

"How does he dare to be surrealistic?"

"I believe in bad translations."

"Poetry, boys and girls…" After all, we are at an all-women’s college.

"We’re fine on time. But we don’t have coffee. And we can’t smoke." Accepting bits of reality. (This after elaborately suggesting in the previous class that perhaps we wouldn’t mind smoke…)

"Are you bored? I am." Not what you want to hear from a professor.

"You can’t really do that in English, even for educational purposes."

"That’s better than I expected, but in an outlandish direction." Well, I thought it was reasonable… speaks for me, I suppose.

"I’m going to say something funny to you, so prepare to smile."

"…pretty cheeky. But in poetry it’s OK, because it only takes two lines and doesn’t tax you much." Talking about explanations of the world.

"What tense did I employ?" Not a rhetorical question. Neither class nor professor knows the answer.

"The law of probability is not suicidal."

"Some days are born ugly. This is one of them."

"You don’t know this gesture, do you?… Good. Stay that way."

"What do you talk about when you’re drunk? Well, at least you, boys." Women, of course.

"Our evening session has a slightly illegal feeling."

"What does one pull? …legs?"

"One man’s Mede is another man’s Persian."

"You were not born yesterday. Practically, but not exactly."

"Unfortunately, we’re not in paradise, we’re in a classroom."

"A little schizophrenia is the norm, I think. But that’s a good thing… it keeps you from going nuts." A discussion about learning additional languages

"Commas do marvels in this world."

"We are dealing in geology here, which is larger than history. Geology starts where history stops. History is grass."

"I’m sorry, I’m just out of my mind."

"By now you are well acquainted with the peculiarities of the Russian grammar." I’ve been studying Russian for three years, and I’m still not well acquainted with the peculiarities of the grammar.

"We have fifteen minutes, do we? Let’s kill them."

"I like the malevolence of this poem."

"If you don’t answer my question, I’m going to go out in the hall and smoke a cigarette. Or perhaps outside."

"Next time I bring pliers."

"Don’t do it for my sake; I’m going to be bored with it anyway." Our term papers appear to be a lost cause.

"‘B’ is for ‘Bearable’" My grade on that paper

"The future is possible. You may not think so, but it is."

"That’s beautiful… beautiful." No, it’s a chair, and it’s just been tripped over.

"I’m going to tell you whatever you like. You don’t understand this, so I won’t ask any questions."

"We have two minutes left, but I’m sick of this."

"Today we’re going to resume our silly games."

"Perhaps in some universe where parallel lines do meet…"

"I’m not responsible for anything. No, I’m responsible for everything."

"This class needs a drill sergeant, not a professor."

"Well, if you don’t see it, I will point it out to you."

"The sum of the courses will be what the parents have paid for."

"It would be nice to appoint some semi-divine entity supervising the arts." …because various pagan pantheons have one up on Christianity, I think

"All these ‘-isms’ are ‘-wasms.’"

"Perhaps it is Morse code, and I am the reciever."

"Eternity is a form of unemployment."

"They’re God’s most successful models… they get a lube job and return to life. It just takes a thousand years. And what’s a thousand years in Elysium?" Discussion of souls in Elysium

"I’m sorry that I’m not very sequential, but you’re used to that."

"I’m not exactly in charge of my own mind."

"I’m not going to finish this sentence, either…"

"Buy farms: that’s what I’m trying to urge upon you."

"For the next two minutes it will be spooky."

"You may, now and then, freak out."

"I need to paint… I mean, do it on the blackboard. I may fail, but let me try."

"Sunlight and Russian poetry… what makes you think they have anything in common?"

"…and Moscow is a good thing to be."

"Here we have a religious conversion—through surgury, but nonetheless a conversion."

"Injected: that’s a gas-station verb."

"Unwittingly or intentionally—both, let’s say, because it makes no bloody difference."

"It’s lovely, it’s cute, but no."