“You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn't save you.”

“And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.”

“My feelings of disgust had been so loud within me, they’d nearly drowned out everything else.”

“It's your duty to use what influence you have, unless you want to drift through life like a fish belly-up on the stream""I wish I could believe that life really is something more than a stream that carries us along, belly-up""Alright, if it's a stream, you're still free to be in this part of it or that part, aren't you? The water will divide again and again. If you bump, and tussle, and fight, and make use of whatever advantages you might have-""Oh, that's fine, I'm sure, when you have advantages.""You'd find them everywhere, if you ever bothered to look!”

“Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.”

“A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence. ”

“Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together...”