One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.

You are suffering from an ailment that affects ladies of romantic imaginations. Symptoms include fainting, weariness, loss of appetite, low spirits. While on one level the crisis can be ascribed to wandering about in freezing rain without the benefit of adequate waterproofing, the deeper cause is more likely to be found in some emotional trauma. However, unlike the heroines of your favorite novels, your constitution has not been weakened by the privations of life in earlier, harsher centuries. No tuberculosis, no childhood polio, no unhygienic living conditions. You'll survive.' " pg. 303

A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.

My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.

There are times when the human face and body can express the yearning of the heart so accurately that you can, as they say, read them like a book. Do not abandon me.

Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.