“A cowardly act! What do I care about that? You may be sure that I should never fear to commit one if it were to my advantage.”

“If you go to your death rather than do everything you might to prevent what is happening, you are merely committing suicide and trying to make yourself feel better about it. That is the act of a coward. It is beneath contempt.”

“People try to say suicide is the most cowardly act a man could ever commit. I don't think that's true at all. What's cowardly is treating a man so badly that he wants to commit suicide.”

“If it were true, that old legend about appearing before a supreme judge and naming one’s record, I would offer, with all my pride, not any act I committed, but one thing I have never done on this earth: that I never sought an outside sanction. I would stand and say: I am Gail Wynand, the man who has committed every crime except the foremost one: that of ascribing futility to the wonderful act of existence and seeking justification beyond myself. This is my pride: that now, thinking of the end, I don not cry like all the men of my age: but what was the use and the meaning? I was the use and meaning. I, Gail Wynand. That I lived and that I acted.”

“As we flew down the highway I started to think seriously about what I was doing and what would happen. I felt Beau’s hand slide over mine, holding my hands tighter to his chest. It was then I realized that I didn’t care what was going to happen. I didn’t care that we had just left everything I knew or that we’d committed grand theft auto. It didn’t feel wrong to me. I felt like those moments were what life was all about; seizing the ones that make you feel alive and never letting go.”

“What am I to call it? Diffidence? The fear of ridicule? Inverted vanity? What matters names, if it has brought me to this? I could never bear to be bustling about nothing; I was ashamed of this toy kingdom from the first; I could not tolerate that people should fancy I believed in a thing so patently absurd! I would do nothing that cannot be done smiling. I have a sense of humour, forsooth! I must know better than my Maker. And it was the same thing in my marriage," he added more hoarsely. "I did not believe this girl could care for me; I must not intrude; I must preserve the foppery of my indifference. What an impotent picture!""Ay, we have the same blood," moralised Gotthold. "You are drawing, with fine strokes, the character of the born sceptic.""Sceptic?—coward!" cried Otto. "Coward is the word. A springless, putty-hearted, cowering coward!”