Yet the fact had no consciousness of itself except through me.

Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.

If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this to be particularly true in the case of professors or intellectuals, who are full of fascinating information, but need encouragement before they'll divulge it.

God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.

Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.

This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.

the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.