“If home is where the heart is, Jason had lived in his throat for a long time.”

“If home is where the heart is, Jason has lived in his throat for a long time.”

“Most nightmares are caged in their realm by implausibilities. The sleeper slogs through quicksand in a fun house of frightening nonsense and disjointed mumbo jumbo. But everything’s all better once the bedside lamp is back on, because reality, even when it’s bad, is easily distinguished from night terror. Except for the trying-to-scream dream. That one’s pretty much spot-on.”

“Guilt wears track shoes. Sprint, marathon, or cross-country, it doesn’t matter. It runs tireless to catch you, and it carries a sledgehammer.”

“The person of winning personality attracts his pupils who will do anything for his sake and are fond and eager in all their ways, docile to the point where personality is submerged, and they live on the smiles, perish on the averted looks, of the adored teacher. Parents look on with a smile and think that all is well; but Bob or Mary is losing that growing time which should make a self-dependent, self-ordered person, and is day by day becoming a parasite who can go only as he is carried, the easy prey of fanatic or demagogue.”

“A long time from now someone unknown to me will stand on the white plain where I now stand. He will speak a different language and the mountains in the distance may have been ground down but there are certain constants that will reliably inform his life -- kings like great trees whose roots are watered in ignorance, men who come to war reluctantly only to discover they have the souls of jackals, and fortresses like mountains, as immovable and inevitable. I anticipate that a flash of intuition will make him look at the tumulus or crater or clamorous sprawling city where Troy once stood and intuit how many men once bent their minds toward its destruction.”

“A world full of people who want to know what you will be, what is your skill and what is your purpose. In the north, if a man had come and said "What will you be? What will you do?" I would have laughed at this kind of person that lives all the time in the future.”