“What matters is at the end of life, when you're about to pass into oblivion, that you've at least scratched 'Kilroy was here,' on the last wall of the universe.”

“What matters creative endless toil, When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?”

“Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life—one scratched on the wall.”

“But whether there's some grand design really matters little to me. My only hope was this. To see what could be, and to believe that it should be, and then to do all I could to bring it to pass, whatever the cost. And when a life ends as mine will end, no one can persuade me that the cost was not worth what it has brought me at last.”

“Letters of the condemned. Last words scratched on a cell’s wall. To write like that.”

“You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.”