Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.

You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.

That familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

Intelligence is measured by a person's ability to see validity within both sides of contradicting arguments.

Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game

It is not merely enough to have the ability to be persistant, you must also have the ability to start over.