“Every night after dinner he honed this skill of enduring a dull thing that brought a parent pleasure. It seemed to him a lifesaving skill. He believed that terrible harm would come to him when he could no longer preserve his mother's illusions.”

“She was in a terrible marriage and she couldn't talk to anyone. He used to hit her, and in the beginning she told him that if it ever happened again, she would leave him. He swore that it wouldn't and she believed him. But it only got worse after that, like when his dinner was cold, or when she mentioned that she'd visited with one of the neighbors who was walking by with his dog. She just chatted with him, but that night, her husband threw her into a mirror.”

“He seemed to be at that most dangerous of ages, where strength, skill, and confidence met naïveté and idealism; when young men skilled at the crafts of violence could be manipulated into employing those skills with brutal efficiency--and without questions.”

“They made him [Stephen] a little canvas boat, and it was thought that if he were obliged to wear two sea-elephant's bladders, blown up and attached to his person, he could not come to harm in such a placid sea; but after an unfortunate experience in which he became involved in his umbrella and it was found that the bladders buoyed up his meagre hams alone, so that only the presence of Babbington's Newfoundland preserved him, he was forbidden to go unaccompanied.”

“It seemed to him that every time he made one choice in his life, he said no to another. All of those things he could not do or be were huddled inside of him; they might spring up at any moment, and he would be hobbled with regret.”

“Every man has a specific skill, whether it is discovered or not, that more readily and naturally comes to him than it would to another, and his own should be sought and polished. He excels best in his niche - originality loses its authenticity in one's efforts to obtain originality.”