"Perhaps a classic is a work that one imagines
should be common knowledge, but more and more often isn't."
W. S. Merwin in Lost
Classics, ed. Michael Ondatje et al. (New York: Anchor, 2000) 143.
"A classic is a book that has never finished
saying what it has to say."
Italo Calvino Definition
5 in "Why Read the Classics?" in The Uses of Literature, tr. Patrick Creagh
(San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986) 128.