"The misery stayed, not thought about but aching away, and sometimes I would have to ask myself, Why do I ache? Men can get used to anything, but it takes time."

"In the dusk I saw her smile, that incredible female smile. It is called wisdom but it isn't that but rather an understanding that makes wisdom unnecessary."

"Ellen, only last night, asked, 'Daddy, when will we be rich?' But I did not say to her what I know: 'We will be rich soon, and you who handle poverty badly will handle riches equally badly.' And that is true. In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms."

"No one wants advice — only corroboration."

"To be alive at all is to have scars."

"Can you disbelieve in something you don't know about? […] It isn't that I don't believe but that I don't know."

"A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody."

"What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately."

"Even if teen-age children aren't making a sound, it's quieter when they're gone. They put a boiling in the air around them. As they left, the whole house seemed to sigh and settle. No wonder poltergeists infest only houses with adolescent children."

"What a wonderful thing a woman is. I can admire what they do even if I don't understand why."

"I guess we're all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn't explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn't explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic, because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out."

"A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers."

"When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people. Maybe that means — hell, it's complicated."

"Does anyone ever know even the outer fringe of another? What are you like in there? Mary — do you hear? Who are you in there?"

"No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself."

"Sometimes it's great fun to be silly, like children playing statues and dying of laughter. And sometimes being silly breaks the even pace and lets you get a new start."

"They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren't so unlike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people's property."

"It is odd how a man believes he can think better in a special place. I have such a place, have always had it, but I know it isn't thinking I do there, but feeling and experiencing and remembering. It's a safety place — everyone must have one, although I never heard a man tell of it."

"My dreams are the problems of the day stepped up to absurdity, a little like men dancing, wearing the horns and masks of animals."

"I'm sorry," Ethan said. "You have taught me something — maybe three things, rabbit footling mine. Three things will never be believed — the true, the probable, and the logical. I know now where to get the money to start my fortune."

"Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn’t do anything about it."

"You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future."

"If you want to keep a friend never test him."

"Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?"

"Failure is a state of mind. It’s like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it."

"For the most part people are not curious except about themselves."

"We can shoot rockets into space but we can’t cure anger or discontent."

"Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future."

"When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something—anything—before it is all gone."

"The incident seemed to prove to me that intentions, good or bad, are not enough."

"I guess I’m trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again."

"People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don’t dream at all."

"Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?"

"I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it."

"It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone."

"I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen."

"The human fetus is born upside down. But it is not true that a child becomes upright after birth. Observe the feet of children and young people when they are at rest. The feet are nearly always higher than the head, No matter how hard he may try, the growing boy, and particularly girl, cannot keep the feet down. The fetal position is very strong. It takes eighteen to twenty years for the feet finally to accept the ground as their normal home. It is my hypothesis that you can judge maturity exactly by the relationship of the feet to the ground."

"The one thing our species is helpless against is good fortune. It first puzzles, then frightens, then angers, and finally destroys us."

"You are a good man, Sire, and a good man draws women as cheese draws mice."

"It is the misfortune of men to want to do a thing well, even a thing they do not want to do at all."

"I don't anticipate trouble and so I anticipate trouble."

"Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts, perhaps fear of a loss of power."

"I have known many people to ask for advice but very few who wanted it and none who followed it."

"It is a matter of disillusion to young male Americans otherwise informed, to discover that the French are a moral people — judged, that is, by American country-club standards."

"No one knows how greatness comes to a man. It may lie in his blackness, sleeping, or it may lance into him like those driven fiery particles from outer space. These things, however, are known about greatness: need gives it life and puts it in action; it never comes without pain; it leaves a man changed, chastened, and exalted at the same time — he can never return to simplicity."

"Doc cried to no one, "Give me a little time! I want to think.[…] Everyone has something. And what has Suzy got? Absolutely nothing in the world but guts. She's taken on an atomic world with a sling-shot, and, by God, she's going to win! If she doesn't win there's no point in living any more. "What do I mean, win?" Doc asked himself. "I know. If you are not defeated, you win""