Love was the most susceptible to random failure of all human enterprises.

When the world turns chaotic, we must be the better part of chaos.

Do you think the occasional witch burning helps to weld society together?

A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn't know it yet.

Why would anybody be a Satanist, anyway? I don’t get it. You can’t believe in Satan without believing in God, and then you’re just picking the wrong side in a big mythic battle thing.

Loneliness was a full-body sensation, an anti-exhilaration, from his core outward.

That’s the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else.

What was worse, being crazy or being evil?

Self-awareness paradoxically requires an awareness of the other.

And she felt like they, the two of them, right here, right now, could make something that defied tragedy.

Laurence felt a weird combination of shame and rage, as though he'd grown another new body part just in time to get punched in it.

Dedicate yourself to what gives your life true meaning and purpose

Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake : he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost.

It's gonna take me a lot longer than a year without you to get over you.

As soon as any man says of the affairs of the State "What does it matter to me?" the State may be given up for lost.

I always imagined I could be what I wanted to be.

In our dreams we can have our eggs cooked exactly how we want them, but we can't eat them.

Sarcasm is the lowest form of humor but the highest form of flattery.

[The lion] began to contemplate me with a kind of quiet premeditation, like that of a slow-witted man fondling an unaccustomed thought.

When you are willing to stop looking for something in thought, you find everything in silence.

Tanglewood [summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra] was a place where gods strode the earth.