Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.

I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.

By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.

You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all.

Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you.