The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost.

We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!

It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.

Habit is necessary. It is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.