"What was that teacher trying to do? That teacher was trying to break her spirit. But why would school do that? So you could become someone like her parents and believe in the things they believe in. So you won’t believe in the things they don’t believe in. And believe you’re a happy person whose life has meaning. So you will go to your job and do whatever gross thing someone tells you to do and get drunk on Friday and Saturday nights and pay taxes and bills. That’s why."

"You are either the man in the white coat or you are the monkey. Susan sees herself as the monkey."

"She’s got space. Lots of space in her house. What about in her heart?"

"To give is best, live responsibly or die."

"“Acid,” says the guy with the eyes, “raises your powers of integration so that everything is important.” “Acid,” says Chiron, “lowers your powers of discrimination so that everything seems important.”"

"In the beginning and the end, it’s all a crapshoot. The Cosmic Mind does play dice. Loves to gamble, in fact."

"Consider impact before you consider benefit."

"I didn’t lie. I implied."

"Prostitution has little to do with morality, and everything to do with poverty."

"She sat silent for a moment. The real world always lay out there waiting, ready to ambush you with something you could not control. The history you’ve made up for your own private kingdom turns out to be the national epic of some obscure country."

"That’s what’s missing, she thought. Everyone in the city is so passionate about things. Here they are only passionate about their religion. They’ve lost everything else."

"“Lots of people would give anything to be in your place.” “I’m not lots of people,” Mary said. “I’m me. That’s what I’ll never forgive, that you did all this without even asking me.”"

"Maybe art couldn’t survive it if was sponsored by the government. Maybe art always had to be subversive."

"You really can’t choose the people you’re going to like."

"“I can’t believe this,” Mary said, whispering urgently. “Every time I talk to you I think I’ve heard the worst, and then you come along and say something even stupider.”"

"“Robert, how have you been? You look good. They’ve been telling me a fantastic story, I don’t believe a word of it…” Robert sat down at the table next to Paul and ordered grenadine. “It’s all true,” he said. “Every word of it, even the parts they made up.”"

"He knew that there could never be an apology enormous enough for what he had just said. He didn’t care. He was tired of people who told him what state his soul was in, André and Antonin and a few of the others who took their cue from André. He had gone through something, something so strange that even now he was not sure what it meant, but he knew he was somehow stronger for it. He would not give that up to be a follower again."

"Layla’s story, though not always accurate, was far more interesting than the truth."

"You think you know what your life will be like thirty years from now and suddenly you’re doing something you couldn’t have planned five minutes ago."

"Movies should be silent, like dreams."

"“A novel?” André laughed. “The novel’s dead—don’t waste your time. The novel takes a small—oh, infinitely small—cut-and-dried section of so-called reality and calls it art. Your life is art. Don’t waste it trying to write a novel.”"

"They passed a closed police station. Someone had written on the wall, “It is forbidden to forbid.”"

"Suddenly he didn’t care if the revolution were lost or won, only that it be over."

"Claude sighed. “All right, you’re a poet,” he said. “I don’t understand why poets can’t make the effort to get along like everyone else.” “Ah,” Robert said. “But we poets can’t understand why everyone else is making the effort.”"

"Collective insanity is boring. Individual insanity—that’s what interests me."

"I’ve got to live up to their expectations by acting irresponsibly again."

"Three of her children were in school. At some time the government had recorded that Mama had three children of school age, so every day Mama sent three different children off to school. The teachers never seemed to notice."

"She felt that she had seen beneath the mask of the world, and she could not quite believe in that mask again."

"Your father was a very wise man. But you cannot acquire his wisdom by pretending to have it already."

"You think you can be as heroic as he was, simply by dying. But he doesn’t take courage to die. That’s easy. It takes courage to live."

"A magician’s business is with words. He may use other things to help him along—amulets and so forth—but it is within words that the power lies. To choose the wrong words may mean death. And so magicians learn, from the first, to use as few words as possible, to answer as few questions as we can."

"You are wrong, Rabbi. You did not kill your daughter. And it does not matter now if you could have done something to save her or not. To think about what might have happened is useless. You can think about what might have happened, turn it over and over in your mind until you can’t think of anything else. You can plan your revenge or—or suicide. But none of that can change the past. The dead—your daughter and my parents—they would want us to go on. To live."

"“You can’t ask questions like that,” André said. “The unconscious has its own logic.” But he looked a little puzzled, a little too tied to the world of logic and order."

"She was already caught in the enchanted net of the bookshelves. She walks down rows of books about history, science, cooking, a large section devoted to car repair. Her feet on the linoleum floor, and the young man turning pages, made the only sounds in the store. It’s like drinking, Claire thought, delighted, running her fingers over the spines. Worse, because the spell lasts longer. If you read, don’t drive."

"“It would make a good tourist attraction,” Mitchell said. Jara looked at him oddly, and for a moment he feared he’d said the wrong thing again. Then Jara laughed. “You Americans,” he said. “That is all you think about, your tourist attractions. You are the great spectators. The other countries of the world put on their shows for you, display their ruins, their pottery, their dances and religions. And you watch. You watch because your country has no past of its own. Is that right?” Mitchell shrugged. He had never really given it much thought. “But you are right,” Jara said. “It would make a good tourist attraction. That would be one way we could finance the excavation.” Ah ha, Mitchell thought. You laugh at the Americans, but when you need money for something we’re the first people you think of."

"We are all tourists in each others’ lives. We all have monuments and ruins, places of strange beauty and forbidden sites chained off and locked securely so that no visitors can get in. And none of us has the guidebook to anyone else, or even the list of most commonly used phrases. We just have to get along the best we can."

"the perverted picture as seen in opera and drama may not become our permanent impression of Mérimée's Carmen. Stage versions and adaptations minimize the misery, squalor, and tragedy of the gypsy girl's life and thereby lose the tremendous force of Mérimée's story. To know both may be good, but to mistake one for the other is not. As one critic has said, "Mérimée's Carmen is a gentleman's Carmen.""

"When the youthful Queen Victoria was in Paris in 1840, she said to the Queen of France, whose guest she was, 'Do you find my French accent bad?' The Queen made a polite reply, but the King, Louis-Philippe, said to Victoria playfully, 'My dear child, they say that we here in the Tuileries do not speak very good French either. Let us send for Prosper Mérimée..."

"Mérimée hated effects and pretense; he had no mercy for writers who strove to bring together words which were surprised to find themselves in the same company, who tried to polish their periods to give weird turns to trifling thoughts merely for the effect."

"Some good judges assert that his is the best French prose that can be found. Hugo's anagram, première prose, is apt and felicitous."

"I would willingly give Thucydides for some authentic memoirs by Aspasia or by a slave of Pericles."

"“You are settling in?” he said. “Your rooms are sufficient; the fire is lit, the floors swept; all ets are ceteraed?”"

"Dorie smiled sideways up at her in the manner of children everywhere when they’d gotten away with something."

"Jane nodded, and she mentally thanked the several-greats-grandmother who had decided she’d rather risk royal displeasure than give up a book."

"Anything that lives forever gets bored."

"“The guests will arrive soon,” he said, as lightly as if they had been only talking about the weather. “For this tedious chore we call a ‘party.’ We pronounce mingling with uninspired souls ‘charming,’ and talking of unimportant topics ‘delightful.’ Oh, I despise it.”"

"The thought flashed that this was what taking chances was—you always thought in the back of your mind that doing the right thing would lead you down the right path to the right outcome. But when it came down to it, you might still fail, and everything might end in disaster. Faith in your decision did not mean that the best was going to happen."

"“You’re just doing that to pass the time,” said Davide, dismissively. “Just to pass the time,” agreed Jac. “Though I suppose time will pass, in any case, regardless of what I do.”"

"Jack considered: there were worse things that could happen than him dying. Of course, there were much better things, too."

"What’s inside the box? Doubt is there. What’s another name for doubt? Death is another name for doubt. Death is what inflects the immortal certainty of the universe’s process with uncertainty."