“There is a time to study a map passionately, obsessively. To see where you've gone, where others have gone before you. To commit to memory every obstacle, every danger. Shakespeare had a term for this obsession: mappery. But there is a time, too, when you say, come dragons. I challenge you to find me.”

“With every shovelful, it's like we're traveling back in time. Where no one has gone for centuries...or maybe never gone before.”

“You obsess (but of course you obsess) until the joy is gone from that thing you'd loved, until your fury overwhelms your passion, until you no longer know how to sit with your back against a tree and write poetry that no one will ever see.”

“That’s the thing about success and happiness. Every time I fall in love I become absolutely, pathologically obsessed. The moment that you have what you want, and you’re not totally ready for it, you become obsessed with the idea that you don’t deserve it.”

“I know one thing for certain; it is much harder to tell whether you are lost than whether you were lost, for, on many occasions, where you are going is exactly where you are. On the other hand, if you often find that where you've been is not at all where you should have gone, and, since it's much more difficult to find your way back from someplace you've never left, I suggest you go there immediately and then decide.”

“You’re not like other people and it pains me to see you do something so common when I know there’s much more to you than that. (Jack)How do you know? (Lorelei)I see it every time I look at you. You have a passion for life that burns so bright it almost singes me to be near it. Every time I see you suppress that fire it pains me. I don’t want anything to extinguish that fire. (Jack)”