“Sickness is the vengeance of nature for the violation of her laws.”

“She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ...”

“I now understand the need for faith—pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith—as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.”

“The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer”

“...with her self-esteem perilously balanced on her excellence, she could only interpret failure as catastrophic. Lilly shamed herself when she made a mistake, becoming upset not only about her performance but about who she was as a human being. ...She reached her heights at a steep internal price. Her Good Girl thinking forced her to walk an unforgiving line; one misstep would plummet her to the snapping jaws of failure. ...Her unreasonable expectations kept her shackled to failure, preventing her from shaking off a mistake and moving forward quickly.”

“Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life.”

“... you "met" this Moneta ... or whatever her real name is ... in her past but your future ... in a meeting that's still to come”