“I was a happy melancholy, though — a contradiction in terms, to be sure, but every human understands this paradox, because they have all felt it.”

“...yesterday I saw Quentin not as the bright face everyone puts on for the purpose of dating but as she was when things broke down, and I still wanted to be there. Maybe more than ever, if only to enjoy the happiness that inevitably follows tragedy, when everything works out.”

“There's time enough, though. Time enough to learn everything about one another. That's the adventure. And the longer it takes just means we'll never get bored.”

“He says he knows someone isn't from the same race as he when that person looks at his library and asks, 'Have you read all of these?' A true book lover knows that, no, he hasn't read them all. It's about the process, it's about when the right reference comes up, you have the right book to go to; it's about never being without something to occupy your eyes and mind.”

“Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has to be created between people. This is true in political situations. The quality and depth of the politics evolving from a group depends in large part on their understanding of honor. Much of what is narrowly termed "politics" seems to rest on a longing for certainty even at the cost of honesty, for an analysis which, once given, need not be re-examined…It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.”

“in the nineteenth year and the eleventh monthspeak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides:Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnelon ones we knew and lovedPraise to life though its windows blew shuton the breathing-room of ones we knew and lovedPraise to life though ones we knew and lovedloved it badly, too well, and not enoughPraise to life though it tightened like a knoton the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved usPraise to life giving room and reasonto ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable.Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.”

“I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed 'patrivincialism' or patrochialism': the assumption that women are a subgroup, that men's culture is the 'real' world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the 'great' or 'liberalizing' periods of history have been the same for women as for men...”