“I was only twelve, but through the slow, inevitable burn of a thousand sunrises and sunsets, a thousand maps traced and retraced, I had already absorbed the valuable precept that everything crumbled into itself eventually, and to cultivate a crankiness about this was just a waste of time.”

“I just get a feeling sometimes that everything is predetermined, and I am going through the motions of tracing an existence that will be what it will already be.”

“-And there's this twelve thousand dollars item for books.-That supposed to be twelve hundred, the twelve thousand is for paper.towels. Besides there is already that bequest for the library.-Did it say books in so many words? No. It's just a bequest for the library.-Use it for pegboard. You need pegboard in a library. Books you don't know what you're getting into.”

“... I retraced my steps, walked up to her, and in another moment would have certainly said, "Madam!" if I had not known that that exclamation had been made a thousand times before in all Russian novels of high life. It was that alone that stopped me.”

“The passion, God knows for what cause…disappeared, leaving no trace whatever behind it, except my heart wasted and ruined as if it had been scorched by a thousand lightnings”

“Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.”