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

I don't like girls in the daytime,' he said shortly, and then thinking this a bit abrupt, he added: 'But I like you.' He cleared his throat. 'I like you first and second and third.

He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work, exasperated every master in school. He grew discouraged and imagined himself a pariah; took to sulking in corners and reading after lights. With a dread of being alone he attached a few friends, but since they were not among the elite of the school, he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy.

he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

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.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

Stahr's eyes and Kathleen's met and tangled. For an instant they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was slower than an embrace, more urgent than a call.