The Book of Shadows

Currently reading Don Paterson's collection of aphorisms The Book of Shadows, and liking some very much.
A few

Translated verse is usually given away by the strenuous informality of its delivery. As if you had presented your passport and visa before anyone had asked for it: such behaviour only arouses suspicion.

The perverse refusal of so many contemporary philosophers to provide an illustrative anecdote...possibly for fear that were they to find flesh to stick to the theory, they would produce only a host of unrecognizable chimeras that would either damn it out of sight or reveal the entire discipline as nothing more than a branch of fantastic literature.

Appalling that so many of my imagined triumphs still take place before my second-year school assembly, who will finally vindicate me...

After a long period of reflection, he decided that he was in fact right yet again.