“He didn't ask "Where will you spend eternity?" as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, "With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?”

“In here, the human bosom -- mine, yours, everybody's -- there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me?”

“You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.”

“Well, I need a job. Something that'll leave me the free time I want.""I like the way you arrange your life. What do you intend to do with this free time?""I intend to use it." I didn't like the implication of this. Why should he need his time free and I be questioned?”

“He knew what retributions your devils are liable to bring for the way you treat your wife and women or behave while your father is on his deathbed, what you ought to think of your pleasure, of acting like a cockroach; he had the intelligence for the comparison. He had the intelligence to be sublime. But sublimity can't exist only as a special gift of the few, due to an accident of origin, like being born an albino. If it were, what interest would we have in it?”

“But Mimi- her tenderness didn't have an easy visibility. You wondered what it would be, and after what terrible manifestations it would appear.”

“Art -- the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos -- art, not politics, is the remedy.”