Don't wait for the right opportunity: create it.

A woman whose face looked as if it had been made of sugar and someone had licked it.

Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat? Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.

A succession of eye-openers each involving the repudiation of some previously held belief.

God has given us a world that nothing but our own folly keeps from being a paradise.

You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys, and my day's wage. You are my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my rapscallionly fellow vagabond, my tempter and star. I want you.

The great dramatist has something better to do than to amuse either himself or his audience. He has to interpret life.