“Praise the world to the angel, not what can’t be talked about.You can’t impress him with your grand emotions. In the grand cosmoswhere he so intensely feels, you’re just a novice. So showhim some simple thing shaped for generation after generationuntil it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it’s ours.Tell him about things. He’ll stand amazed, just as you didbeside the ropemaker in Rome or the potter on the Nile.Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours;how even grief’s lament purely determines its own shape,serves as a thing, or dies in a thing — and escapesIn ecstasy beyond the violin.”

“It's an incredible thing, how you can feel so taken care of by someone and yet feel, also, like you would die or do anything just for the chance to protect him back.”

“You can’t control what others think. The only thing you can control is yourself. Some people will look down on you for your choices in life, no matter what they are. You can’t do anything about that. The only thing you can do is decide how to live your own life. And to hell with everybody else”

“So many things shape our lives, our choices, our decisions, but in the end we make our own destiny. – Jack Maguire (hero)”

“Charlie, don’t you get it? I can’t feel that. It’s sweet and everything, but it’s like you’re not even there sometimes. It’s great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn’t need a shoulder? What if they need the arms or something like that? You can’t just sit there and put everybody’s lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can’t. You have to do things.”

“We worship…the powers that speak to our souls, if it seems they do. We do so knowing there is more to the world, and the half-world, and perhaps worlds beyond, than we can grasp. We always knew that. We can’t even stop children from dying, how would we presume to understand the truth of things? Behind things? Does the presence of one power deny another? [p. 176]”