“Should he give free reign to his desires, the bibliomaniac can ruin his life along with the lives of his loved ones. He'll often take better care of his books than of his own health; he'll spend more on fiction than he does on food; he'll be more interested in his library than in his relationships, and, since few people are prepared to live in a place where every available surface is covered with piles of books, he'll often find himself alone, perhaps in the company of a neglected and malnourished cat. When he dies, all but forgotten, his body might fester for days before a curious neighbor grows concerned about the smell.”

“You know," he went on almost under his breath, "every man who thinks for himself and feels vividly finds he lives in a world of his own, apart, and believes that one day he'll come across, either in a book or in a person, the Priest who shall make it clear to him.”

“My love runs by like a day in June, And he makes no friends of sorrows. He'll tread his galloping rigadoon In the pathway of the morrows. He'll live his days where the sunbeams start, Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart, -- And I wish somebody'd shoot him.”

“He'll pinch a cigarette between his fingers. He'll take a drag, blow that drag between his lips. He'll look at the firl with eyes the colour of the sky before it turns black and he will see heaven, and the pictures of all those other girls floating inside his head will blow away like the clouds of the cigarette and he'll see only the girl inside himself and the world will stop.”

“The most important thing to remember, the guiding principle, is to try to keep your son's self esteem intact while he is in school. That is the real risk to his success and to his mental health. Once he's out of school, the world will be different. He'll find a niche where the fact that he can't spell well or didn't read until he was eight, won't matter. But if he starts to hate himself because he isn't good at schoolwork, he'll fall into a hole that he'll be digging himself out of for the rest of his life.”

“His [(Rumpelstiltskin)] feeling that his name, which is his identity, must be kept secret, or else he'll be revealed to the world as the hunchbacked, shriveled, ridiculous creature he knows himself to be. And if that happens, he'll disappear.”

“...There,in his foul, stinking cellar, our offended, down-trodden and ridiculed mouse immerses himself in cold, venomous and, cheifly, everlasting spite. For forty years on end he will remember the offence, down to the smallest and most shameful detail, constantly adding more shameful details of his own, maliciously teasing and irritating himself with his own fantasies. He himself will be ashamed of his fantasies, but nevertheless he will remember all of them, weighing them up and inventing all sorts of things that never happend to him, on the pretext that they too could have happend and he'll forgive nothing. Probably he'll start taking his revenge, but somehow in fits and starts, pettily, anonymously, from behind the stove, believing neither in his right to take revenge, nor in the success of his revenge and knowing beforehand that he will suffer one hundred times more from every single one of his attempts at revenge than the object of his revenge, who, most likely, wont't give a damn.”