"Here he was, not quite twenty-five years old, and he was going to have to make a new life for himself. A host of options lay before him, but, tipsy with Chablis and sunshine, at the moment all he could truly feel was a powerful sense of loss and uncertainty. All the routes to his previous self—the self that had tried to survive as a loner in Fort Walton Beach—were blocked, and he did not know which new path to choose. “Ciao,” he said again, and this time he was not talking to his mother."

"They had both changed in eight years, eroded or subtly augmented by the sweep of time’s river."

"You can’t go home again, particularly if you never had one."

"Extinction confers on the has-been the same mythological status that imagination confers on the never-was."

"Paleoanthropologists were congenitally media-oriented."

"Necessary is often the mother of light fingers instead of invention."

"A rational, humane solution—for Gelvri, as Elgran Vrai, believed rationality and humaneness tautologies, different names for the same thing."

"He forgave these Tropemen, then felt contempt for himself for the presumption of extending forgiveness, then forgave again, then cursed his own vanity, forgave once more, condemned his presumption, and at last forgave even himself."

"Like all such prophecies, it’s impressive only if not examined too closely."

"Outside the rain continued its cadenced and indifferent commentary."

"“Magistrate, a problem doesn’t cease to exist simply because you cease to consider it a problem.” ”Very often, Deputy Foutlif, it does.”"

"Both God and man hold each other in equally beautiful contempt."

"“Do you expect even dreams to unravel rationally, Kahl Balduin? Must each event have a precise, empirical cause?” “No, not if you’re narrating a dream. But if you claim, like the Pledgeson, that your visions and reality are the same thing, then, yes I expect consistency. I’m too old for pointless fairy tales.”"

"But each man who worships you sees only what he wishes to see rather than any mystery you may actually embody."

"The vitality of children is clean and honest. Their petty shortcomings derive, in ninety-nine out of a hundred instances, from their effete elders’ pettiness. Contagion is a generational fact. But children can develop defenses against their elders’ spiritual scurvy simply because they’re new."

"Don’t look for reason where it’s never been practiced."

"“Nature has its own logic, or so brother Peter tells us.” “The logic of chance—amoral and sometimes inaccurate.” “Well, Foutlif, we Earthmen are products of the ‘natural’ process; consequently, you shouldn’t be surprised to find us both of those things at times—amoral and inaccurate.”"

"Who but a madman would grapple with mountains?"

"Coercion is the tool of the desperate."

"What motivates you, then? Please don’t tell me altruism. I am not quite so gullible as that."

"I have thought a little about a telepathic community, and I have decided that it would most likely create either a thoroughly paranoiac or a thoroughly homogeneous unit of individuals. Complete suspicion and hostility in the one instance, total harmony and concord in the other. I do not like either alternative."

"God could hardly damn me for a coward, great cosmic exemplar of laissez-faire that he is."

"What was reprehensible in being fearful in the presence of the unknown?"

"Tiglathpileser was a human, it’s rumored. And Caligula. So were a whole host of twentieth-century tyrants. So presumably were the brain-dead idiots who turned the Earth into a treeless detention camp. Being human, I’m afraid, doesn’t automatically confer demigod status on anyone."

"“The True Word. Once every quarter, once every new-style month, I preach it.” “The True Word on what? Everybody’s got his own true word, you know.” “On how not to die, woman. The basis of every religion.” “No,” Zoe said. Not every one of them; just the ones that don’t know exactly what to do with the here-and-now.”"

"His foot always got caught in that wide, loose stirrup: his mouth."

"I have no thesis except that people get a very raw deal from life."

"In its wisdom, the law said: No man shall be the judge of his own cause. [...] The law, nothing but reason, took judicial notice of man's nature, of how far his conscience could guide him against his interest. For the slake of others, for his own sake, the law would not let him be led into temptation. In its wisdom, the law aimed only at certainty, could not, did not, really hope to get there. This science, as inexact as medicine, must do its justice with the imprecision of wisdom, the pragmatism of a long, a mighty experience. Those balances were to weigh, not what was just in general, but which might be just between these actual adversaries."

"I was brought up to look upon falling in love as something natural...something that was pleasant and natural and amusing. I've been in love before, casually, the way young Frenchmen are...but in earnest, too, because a Frenchman can't help surrounding a thing like that with sentiment and romance. He can't help it. If it were just ... just something shameful and nasty, he couldn't endure it. They don't have affairs in cold blood the way I've heard men talk about such things since I've come here. It makes a difference, Mrs. Pentland, if you look at things in the light they do. I've learned now, and it is a thing which needs learning, the most important thing in all life. The French are right about it. They make a fine, wonderful thing of love."

"She had come long ago to understand that loneliness was the curse of those who were free, even of all those who rose a little above the level of ordinary humanity."

"He had a feeling that somewhere in the course of her life something had happened to her, something terrible which in the end had given her a great understanding and clarity of mind. He knew, too, almost at once, on the day she had driven up to the door of the cottage, that she had made a discovery about life which he himself had made long since . . . that there is nothing of such force as the power of a person content merely to be himself, nothing so invincible as the power of simple honesty, nothing so successful as the life of one who runs alone. Somewhere she had learned all this. She was like a woman to whom nothing could ever again happen.”"

"She had turned her back upon them all and no awful fate had overtaken her; instead, she had taken a firm hold upon life and made of it a fine, even glittering, success; and this is a thing which is not easily forgiven."

"Much of the material is controversial, but if controversy means the stimulation of thought and ideas, so much the better. It is only thus that the citizens of a republic may protect themselves from the evils threatening them from within their borders as well as those which threaten from beyond."

"Truth may be found in the heart of a philosopher but seldom in the figures of a statistician; it is far too delicate a thing to be pinned down to columns of numbers on ruled paper."

"When you hear that a certain man is so good that he wants to help everybody, you may depend upon it that he started the story."

"A loafer never works except when there's a fire; then he will carry out more furniture than anybody."

"I know what women expect, and give it to them without disagreeable argument; they'll get it anyway."

"Of living creatures, business men are nearest sane; their philosophy is as accurate as their multiplication table."

"A man who does not fool himself seldom cares much about fooling others. But the man who claims to have seen a ghost wants everybody else to believe in ghosts."

"When half the people believe one thing, and the other half another, it is usually safe to accept either opinion. The Democrats are as good as the Republicans, and the Catholics as good as the Protestants."

"We are now confronted with the necessity of remedying the remedies."

"Silliness which would have broken a politician twenty years ago, now makes his fortune."

"When you can't do anything else to a boy, you can make him wash his face."

"The experience of the world is worth more than the experience of any one man."

"Every man has a long list of things that should be done, but which he knows can't be done. Yet he continues to talk about them as long as he lives."

"However disagreeable a situation is to you, you cannot get rid of it by indignation."

"I have noticed that my likes and dislikes do not create any great excitement. And how people try to get away when I attempt to talk!"

"A small man always has one weapon he can use against a great big man: he can "talk" about him."

"Another thing which is about as sure as death and taxes, is that no man can go on bluffing indefinitely without being called."