“One cultivates one's life, one's friends, one's means, one's hopes. One goes from place to place, from triumph to triumph, in search of ambition and ambition's remedy as though in flight across some imagined map, the subject of a conversation in a comfortable English room.”

“Place in writing often exists at that intersection between the reality of place and one's imagination about that place -- what one believes, hopes, or imagines about the various possibilities of oneself in that place.”

“Failure is the quintessence to triumph. Fear is a necessity. Whatever is needed in one's life to maintain the universal principle of Chaos should be seasoned and not discouraged. Regardless of whether it's crazy, it's one's subjective reality. That makes it beautiful.”

“The English intellect is sound, so far as it goes,but it has one grave defect--it is always cautious in the wrong place.”

“No one can take the place of a friend, no one.”

“But that some sonatas of Beethoven are written tragic no one can gainsay; yet they can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy had decided that they should triumph.”