“As an adult I have often known that peculiar legacy time brings to the traveler: the longing to seek out a place a second time, to find deliberately what we stumbled on once before, to recapture the feeling of discovery. Sometimes we search out again even a place that was not remarkable itself - we look for it simply because we remember it. If we do find it, of course, everything is different. The rough-hewn door is still there, but it's much smaller; the day is cloudy instead of brilliant; it's spring instead of autumn; we're alone instead of with three friends. Or worse, with three friends instead of alone.”

“...what will we someday do, I always wonder, without the pleasures of turning through books and stumbling on things we never meant to find?”

“It gave me a feeling of temporary acceptance into that elite community, to stroll across the quad at his side. It also gave me my first faint quiver of sexual belonging, the elusive feeling that if I slipped my hand into his as we walked along, a door would fall open somewhere in the long wall of reality as I knew it, never to be closed again.”

“Then draw everything. Do a hundred drawings a day,' he said fiercely. 'And remember that it's a hellish life.”

“History has taught us that the nature of man is evil, sublimely so. Good is not perfectible, but evil is. Why should you not use your great mind in service of what is perfectible? I ask you, my friend, to join me of your own accord in my research. If you do so, you will save yourself great anguish, and you will save me considerable trouble. Together we will advance the historian's work beyond anything the world has ever seen. There is no purity like the purity of the sufferings of history. You will have what every historian wants: history will be reality to you. We will wash our minds clean with blood.”

“It's easy to hate women and hate women's bodies when we don't do very much to fight back. We have to step into the skin we're in. Your body isn't perfect? Well, neither is mine. Neither is anyone's. It's time to redefine "perfect" or drop the expectation. It's time to feed ourselves with compassion instead of grief. Compassion instead of starvation. Compassion instead of food.”

“A: The soul wanders in the dark, until it finds love. And so, wherever our love goes, there we find our soul.Q: It always happens?A: If we're lucky. And if we let ourselves be blind. Q: Instead of watching out?A: Instead of always watching out.”