“However aware we are that a certain fate cannot be avoided, we cannot help blaming the person who gets that monster to its feet...and leads it into the room.”

“She is dancing. Away. From you now.She was just a wish.She was just.A.Wish.And her memory is all that is left for you now.”

“A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.”

“A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes. Hugh Dow”

“What we control," Juliette said, "is our actions once fate puts us there.”

“Blindness to larger contexts is a constitutional defect of human thinking imposed by the painful necessity of being able to concentrate on only one thing at a time. We forget as we virtuously concentrate on that one thing that hundreds of other things are going on at the same time and on every side of us, things that are just as important as the object of our study and that are all interconnected in ways that we cannot even guess. Sad to say, our picture of the world to the degree to which it has that neatness, precision, and finality so coveted by scholarship is a false one.I once studied with a famous professor who declared that he deliberately avoided the study of any literature east of Greece lest the new vision destroy the architectonic perfection of his own celebrated construction of the Greek mind. His picture of that mind was immensely impressive but, I strongly suspect, completely misleading.”

“There is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.”