“I agree with you," replied the stranger; "we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves -- such a friend ought to be -- do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures. I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship. You have hope, and the world before you, and have no cause for despair. But I -- I have lost everything, and cannot begin life anew.”

“we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves - such a friend ought to be - do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures.”

“There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge-that is everywhere, that is Atman, that is in me and you and in every creature, and I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge, than learning.”

“Friendship is the most important thing in my life. It's rare to have friends like I've got. If I had as great a taste in husbands as I have in friends, what an even better life I would have had!”

“Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public. We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.”

“Everything had to have a weakness. It was the balance of nature. Faeries, humans, they all had weakness. If he could control his weaknesses to make them nonexistent, then he was dangerous. He was probably the most dangerous creature in existence.”