For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.

It's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be.

It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.

The greatest profound pain is cased by, and is the result of our own illusions, fantasies and dreams.

There has never been an American tragedy. There have only been great failures.

Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.