Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?

I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.

I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.

Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?

He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.