At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.

Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one.

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.

The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.

...books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.

That's what was great about him. He tried. Not many do.

Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence — the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes — all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.