“...for literature had always been a solace for him, something that the ugliness of facts could not spoil.”

“There had always been something to worry him ever since he could remember, always something that distracted him in the pursuit of beauty. For he did pursue beauty, and, therefore, Margaret's speeches did flutter away from him like birds.”

“Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)”

“Music was a balm for any weary soul. It could either lift a person out of the doldrums or comfort him if there was no other solace to be had.”

“I wanted to know how ugly I could get, how ruined and ugly and spoiled, before they stopped trying to fuck me. I didn't think they'd ever notice. Nobody had so far. Because I was still in the shape of a beautiful girl. Although I behaved like an ugly one.”

“Success didn't spoil me, I've always been insufferable.”