Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

That's the whole burden of this novel - the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.

Who would not be pleased at carrying lamps helpfully through the darkness?

It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.

I don't much care where I am anymore, nor expect very much from places.