There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.

Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.

Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.

Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick-of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.

Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.

…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.

You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.