“...there was almost no opinion, however nonsensical, that wasn't tolerated, at least for long enough for it to be delivered. But it wasn't just that, nor his charm nor eccentricity, his sometimes slovenly, sometimes stunning intelligence, that made him so attractive as a tutor; it was the utterly unfamiliar sensation one got, as a student, of his respect for, or at least well-performed interest in, what one thought.”

“It is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same, whether he does or does not perform some very laborious duty, it is certainly his interest, at least as interest is vulgarly understood, either to neglect it altogether, or, if he is subject to some authority which will not suffer him to do this, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner as that authority will permit.”

“Sometimes I thought about nothing and sometimes I thought about my life. At least I made a living. What kind of living? A living. It wasn't easy. I found out how little is unbearable.”

“It wasn't just that Lucy wanted to help him. She wasn't as selfless as that. She was madly attracted to him. She was attracted to all of the normal things and the weird things, too, like the back of his neck and his thumbs on the edge of his desk and the way his hair stuck out on one side like a little wing over his ear. She caught his smell once, and it made her dizzy. She couldn't fall asleep that night.”

“He wasn't into one-night stands, he wasn't into scoring just to see if he could, he wasn't into acting just charming enough to get what he wanted before cutting loose in favor of someone new and attractive. He just wasn't like that. He would never be like that. When he met a girl, the first question he asked himself wasn't whether she was good for a few dates; it was whether she was the kind of girl he could imagine spending time with in the long haul.”

“Funny, he wasn't handsome, not in a Mr. Perfect kind of way, at least. The guy had a nose that had clearly been busted once or three times, and his hazel eyes were too shrewd and too exhausted to be classified as attractive. But he was like a cocked gun: He has a steely intelligence and a dangerous power about him that you respected. Because the combination was a flat-out killer, literally”