“I, a product of the New Frontier and Great Society, honestly believed that the world pretty much owed me a living--all I had to do was wait around in order to live better than my parents.”

“Better to be whipped than humoured; better to be crushed than cherished.… It was a woman told me that. I live in a world of men, my dear,’ Lymond had said. ‘I love you all, but I shall never marry you.”

“It was kind of soothing, these sounds of lives being lived all around me, for better or for worse. And there I was, in the middle of them all, newly reborn and still waiting for mine to begin.”

“I had a rule that it was better to be bored by yourself than to be bored with someone else. I pretty much lived by that rule. Maybe that's why I didn't have any friends.”

“She has to live, Eliott. I owe her a lifetime of apologies.”“Sometimes I think that’s all we owe our parents.”

“Every new encounter provides a new mirror for me to view my own experiences through, and there is a level of selfishness during this period as I hunger to understand more about the girls' lives in order to understand mine. If I could figure out what had happened to them, perhaps I had a better chance of explaining it all to myself.”