"Why can't this priest go back to Los Angeles and leave me alone? Why is he taking me to lunch when he should be out there visiting the sick and the dying? That's what priests are for."

"Why is it the minute I open my mouth the whole world is telling me they're Irish and we should all have a drink? It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen."

"I like the lemon meringue pie but I don't like the way Americans leave out the 'r' at the end of a word."

"I put my books in a bag because I don't care anymore if people in the subway look at me admiringly. I can't hold on to a girl, I can't keep an office job, I make a fool of myself in my first literature class and I wonder why I left Limerick at all. [...] I could have read Jonathan Swift to my heart's content not giving a fiddler's fart whether he was a satirist or a seanachie."

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

"I asked my dad what afflicted meant and he said 'Sickness son, and things that don't fit.'"

"I'd like to stand up in those classes and announce to the world that I'm too busy to be Irish or Catholic or anything else, that I'm working day and night to make a living, trying to read books for my courses and falling asleep in the library [...]."

"I know that big people don't like questions from children. They can ask all the questions they like, How's school? Are you a good boy? Did you say your prayers? but if you ask them did they say their prayers you might be hit on the head."

"It’s lovely to know that the world can’t interfere with the inside of your head."

"I don't know what it means and I don't care because it's Shakespeare and it's like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words."

"He says, you have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace."

"Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale."

"To be a simple animal like my father, untroubled by consciousness, or conscience. To sleep soundly, at east with your certainties, men as expendable as beef. (p. 161)"

"There’s no use saying anything in the schoolyard because there’s always someone with an answer and there’s nothing you can do but punch them in the nose and if you were to punch everyone who has an answer you’d be punching morning noon and night."

"... you, the privileged, the chosen, the pampered, with nothing to do but go to school, hang out, do a little studying, go to college, get into a money-making racket, grow into your fat forties, still whining, still complaining, when there are millions around the world who'd offer fingers and toes to be in your seats, nicely clothed, well fed, with the world by the balls."

"What would I tell her? That I have always known I belonged here? That one day some action will be required that will prove my life's value? A forty-six-year-old man, waiting for fate to take over... it likely already has. (p. 269)"

"Maybe all people with minds like Isaac's were the same. She knew he would make a much larger contribution than she ever would - he cared only about things much bigger than his own life. Ideas, truths, the reasons things were. As if he himself, his own existence, was somehow incidental."

"There's parts of me I don't understand, he said, and shrugged."

"Mental note if you make it to forty remember on how all those fucks treated her. Stop being an asshole while you're still young."

"There'd always been something about the boy, he was smart and stupid at the same time. As if he was meant to do everything the wrong way. Junior league ball, the boy was twelve, they subbed him in for the pitcher, good arm but he chokes, eight runs straight, loses the game. Afterward acting like nothing happened. It made no sense. The feeling that gave you, watching your son lose the game, but he just shrugged it off, didn't care."

"I wonder if I am going crazy or if I do not love my family enough, or if it is the opposite, if I love them too much. If I am the only sane person I know."

"[Y]ou have to save yourself before you can save anyone else."

"She wondered how people would remember her. She had not made enough to spread her wealth around like Carnegie, to erase any sins that had attached to her name, she had failed, she had not reached the golden bough. The liberals would cheer her to death. They would light marijuana cigarettes and drive to their sushi restaurants and eat fresh food that had traveled eight thousand miles. They would spend all of supper complaining about people like her, and when they got home their houses would be cold and they’d press a button on a wall to get warm. The whole time complaining about big oil. (p. 82)"

"I can't go back. The past won't go away in this family."

"Loss of sincerity is loss of vital power."

"It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not."

"Melancholy sees the worst of things,—things as they may be, and not as they are. It looks upon a beautiful face, and sees but a grinning skull."

"The scope of an intellect is not to be measured with a tape-string, or a character deciphered from the shape or length of a nose."

"What a man knows should find its expression in what he does. The value of superior knowledge is chiefly in that it leads to a performing manhood."

"The great obstacle to progress is prejudice."

"At all events, the next best thing to being witty one's self, is to be able to quote another's wit."

"There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate."

"Perhaps no man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions, it may be said, are as necessary to our happiness as realities."

""There is nothing," says a correspondent of the New York Times, "which the business world discards as unpractical and useless so much as the quiet, thinking scholar. But this is the man who makes revolutions. Politicians are mere puppets in the hands of men of thought."

"Patience is only one faculty; earnestness the devotion of all the faculties. Earnestness is the cause of patience; it gives endurance, overcomes pain, strengthens weakness, braves dangers, sustains hope, makes light of difficulties, and lessens the sense of weariness in overcoming them."

"There is probably no hell for authors in the next world — they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this."

"Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was a business; but now, when great fortunes are only made by business, business is war."

"Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and insensibly approximate to the characters we most admire. In this way, a generous habit of thought and of action carries with it an incalculable influence."

"Loose ideas on the subject of business will not answer. It must be reduced to something of a science. It has its principles, upon a knowledge and an application of which, success in it mainly depends."

"Four sweet lips, two pure souls, and one undying affection,—these are love's pretty ingredients for a kiss."

"He has but one great fear that fears to do wrong."

"The first step toward greatness is to be honest, says the proverb; but the proverb fails to state the case strong enough. Honesty is not only "the first step toward greatness," — it is greatness itself."

"A book should be luminous but not voluminous."

"It is the passion that is in a kiss that gives to it its sweetness; it is the affection in a kiss that sanctifies it."

"The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology."

"The light in the world comes principally from two sources,—the sun, and the student's lamp."

"This, then, is my version of the atheist’s way. I think that it is a realistic, unsentimental, arduous, and beautiful way that allows for love, good works, and human-size happiness. At the same time it avoids humbug, especially the crippling and dangerous humbug of god-talk. Take from my version whatever makes sense to you, and heroically fashion your own atheist’s way. Residing as you do in a universe without gods, you must take the lead in creating yourself, making your meaning, and living your ethics. Nothing less than your righteousness and your happiness are at stake. Aren’t you glad that the universe has entrusted these tasks to you and not to some squabbling gods or mountain sprites? Good luck on your atheist’s way—may you make yourself proud!"

"Want a guarantee? Join another species. Our species just makes decisions."

"We do not know why the universe opted to make a creature that can suffer from a toothache one day and rouse his fellow human beings to righteousness the next, but here we are."

"This is your chance! You get to make existential magic, and you need no longer despair that there is no place for you in our mock-pious, bottom line-driven society. As an existential magician, a conjurer with amazing skills bestowed on you by the universe, you can create your own stepping-stones and your own journey, guided by your own moral calculations. You make your meaning, and you also make your ethics. Nature being what it is, you are the only one entitled to do either."