You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.

Nothing fails like failure

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.

The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.

Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.

Because if one has an image, however dim and romantic, of a journey's end, one may, in the end, surely reach it, after no matter how many detours and deceptions and abandonings of hope. And hope could never have been entirely abandoned, even in the worst days.