“All male friendships are essentially quixotic: they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glory and questionable adventure.”

“Long life wore away everything that was not essential.”

“Back in the summer of 1941, they had stood to lose so much, it seemed, through the shame and ruination of exposure. Sammy could not have known that one day he would come to regard all the things that their loving each other had seemed to put at so much risk – his career in comic books, his relations with his family, his place in the world – as the walls of a prison, an airless, lightless keep from which there was no hope of escape….He recalled his and Tracy’s parting at Penn Station on the morning of Pearl Harbor, in the first-class compartment of the Broadway Limited, their show of ordinary mute male farewell, the handshake, the pat on the shoulder, carefully tailoring and modulating their behavior through there was no one at all watching, so finely attuned to the danger of what they might lose that they could not permit themselves to notice what they had”

“He allowed the world to wind him in the final set of chains, and climbed, once and for all, into the cabinet of mysteries that was the life of an ordinary man.”

“For the only true sequel is the one that flickers briefly into being in your mind, O my friend by the fireside, in the moments after you read the last paragraph and lay the book down.”

“It holds my essential stuff, including a book—for true contentment, one must carry a book at all times, and great books so rarely fit, my friends, into one's pocket[…]”

“And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others.”