“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”

“Besides," she says, eyes twinkling mischievously, "it'd never work out between us. I'm still holding a candle for Professor Haven.""How could I compete with a middle-aged English professor?""Well," she says, "you could do, but it'd be useless. Something about his receding hairline just drives me mad.”

“Middle school is for being like everyone else; middle age is for being like yourself. (430)”

“It wasn't going places. It was being between...Mostly it was space. So much space. I liked the idea of nothing on top, nothing on the bottom, and a lot of nothing in between, and me in the middle of the nothing.”

“One of our greatest challenges is to handle Winning without arrogance, being educated without being condescending and having compassion without developing indifference”

“You are like a lighthouse in a bog, brilliant but useless.”