“They had been brought up to think that the domestic virtues were self-evident and universal; they had been starved of the knowledge that most attracts the young mind: that the crown of life is the exercise of choice”

“It came to me…that I didn't want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.”

“He thought it exceedingly unlikely that he would ever have married any girl, however many millions she had, if he had not loved her, and this was probably true enough, for what it is worth. Love and a million dollars is obviously a more attractive proposition than love without it, especially to a young man whose only skills were sonneteering and riding, who had been brought up to the idea of wealth and who had just run through most of his inheritance.”

“He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.”

“One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.”

“The strangest kind of curse had been laid upon him: knowledge without hope of evidence.”