“One wants to move through life with elegance and grace, blossoming infrequently but with exquisite taste, and perfect timing, like a rare bloom, a zebra orchid... One wants... But one so seldom gets what one wants, does one?”

“What makes the voice pathetic is that it doesn't know what kind of people it's reaching. Us. No one hears it, except us. This Age wanted heroes. It got us instead: carefully constructed, but immobile. Subtle but,unfit to take upthe burden of the times. It happens. A whole generation of washouts. History says stand up, and we totter and collapse, weeping, moved, but notsufficient.”

“The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.”

“Opium is the perfect drug for people who want to remain articulate while being completely trivial.”

“I just wondered what a thing it would be...if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away. Free.It would be...heartless terror. Yes. Terrible, and...Very great. To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one and then walk away, unemcumbered, into the morning.”

“We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.”

“One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are.”