“Oliver, success is usually a feeling of mere relief, where failure is pain. Happiness, you see, lies in neither, but in sticking to a daily ritual and becoming absorbed in something useful. When the war is over, even the greatest warriors do not exult. They go back to their garden or kitchen or library -- or school -- and resume life.(as said by Mrs. Pearson)”

“In any case, do you really think kids even want something that is relevant to their daily lives? You think something practical like compound interest is going to get them excited? People enjoy fantasy, and that is just what mathematics can provide -- a relief from daily life, an anodyne to the practical workaday world.”

“[W]e are not merely tempered and schooled by failure but compelled, in however subtle a fashion, to become something other than we were.”

“Shame usually follows a pattern—a cycle of self-recrimination and lies that claims life after life. First, we experience an intensely painful event. Second, we believe the lie that our pain and failure is who we are—not just something we’ve done, or had done to us—and we experience shame. And finally, our feelings of shame trap us into thinking that we can never recover—that, in fact, we don’t even deserve to.”

“Life, Steffi has learned, carries on around the pain, making room for it, absorbing it until it becomes part of the daily fabric, wrapping itself around you and lodging itself in your heart.”

“The greatest reward for a man's failure is not necessarily the consequent success, but what he becomes by it.”