“--Let us make a pact, she said. To madness at every juncture!”

“-Lara is a weasel. I've always hated her. The only happy week I had as a child was when she fell from the roof and went into a coma. She came out of it, though. Everyone was so happy.-Is that true? asked James.-No, said Grieve. But they would have been happy. Everyone thinks she's so clever. And I would be happy if she went away and never came back.”

“I mean that the book had better make life better better in at least six or seven definite ways immediately. Also, there had better be somewhere in it a method for handling fortune and chance so as to best provoke the most complicated, involved, and glorious refractions of what's possible.”

“In a long life, said many an old man, this is but one more thing. Yet there were others who were young and knew nothing about the helplessness of life's condition. Did they glow with light? They did, but of course, it could not be seen. And all the while, the grinding of bones like machinery, and the light step of tightrope walkers out beyond the windows.”

“…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. ""What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability?”

“I shall introduce this city and its occupants as a series of objects whose relationship cannot be told with any certainty. Though violence may connect them, though pity, compassion, hope may marry one thing to another, still all that is in process cannot be judged, and that which has passed has gone beyond judgment, which leaves us again, with lives and belongings, places, shuttling here and there, hapless, benighted, discordant.”

“You live your life, you try to live compassionately, and that's the end of it. You do a little more than you should have to in order to be a good person, but you don't go making big changes in the world, trying to fix things. It presumes too much to do so. There's only this: if everyone acts quietly, compassionately, things will go a little better than they would have otherwise. But people will still suffer.”