Fox

by Joyce Carol Oates

And the name—Genevieve. A silly old-fashioned name she’d hated until in Mr. Fox’s mouth it has become exquisite, sexy.

Pointless to honor the democratic tradition at the Academy if poor decisions are made in a democratic process, defeating the very purpose of democracy.

Francis’s sense of social interaction is repartee, not conversation. Francis avoids the strain of conversing as Francis avoids the tedium of emotional rapport.

What he knows of life: it is hazardous, capricious. Things happen, and then other things happen. In a rowboat in a fast-running river without an oar.

Potential: one of those vague terms which teachers wield like magicians, which arouses hope and despair simultaneously.

Falling in love as in a mutual hypnosis. Delirium! For what was love but a kind of rope you gripped. The promise was that you could tug this rope and it would haul you forward, it would not fall loose in your hands.

For what is reading but the dissolution of the merely personal into the impersonal, a triumph of mental concentration.