“Hope outshines the cynic shadow that stalks the day.”

“Once your decisions take on the impractical responsibility of validating the choices of others, your decisions cease to be your own.”

“It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the typical American college student lays waste his powers. Work and contemplation don't mix, and university days ought to be days of contemplation.”

“Work to realize the possibility of this new day and to make it a truly great one.”

“I write, as far as I can tell, because writing is a black sheep sibling of prayer, an urgent struggle against a bad connection, intent, hopeful, innocent, never quite good enough.”

“We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present”

“One day, I think, we'll invent the most impressive broom an interrogating mind might ever attest to seeing. Enormous, this thing would be, and whole formidable chōbu high and with bristles as coarse and catching as the most perniciously effective cleaning tool. And we will invent a mess esteemed and distinguished enough to satisfy the functions of our enormous, genius broom, and the time will converge wherein both the mess and the broom will not do, so what then, but manufacture something bigger, and more furious, and less manageable?”