"Her dress was a miracle of fine cloth and meticulous workmanship, and, as I later learned, she had woven it herself. But it had darkened like a smoke-blackened family statue in the atrium as if through neglect and was dingy and worn. I could see worked into the bottom border the Greek letters Pi (for practice) and slightly higher Theta (for theory) with steps that were marked between them to form a ladder by which one might climb from the lower to the upper. Some ruffians had done violence to her elegant dress, and clearly bits of the fabric had been torn away." (3)

"Only man is endowed with freedom / that you [God] could constrain but have chosen not to, / and slippery Fortune players her random / games with us. The innocent suffer / penalties proper to malefactors / and wicked men sit up thrones." (19)

"'As soon as I saw you with...