“Sometimes dead is better”

“Fortunately, we did most of our athletic stuff inside, so we didn’t have to jog through Tribeca looking like a bunch of boot-camp hippie children.”

“Oh my dear, you can break my heart, tear my soul, but you will never be able to take my sweet memories and dreams away. Those are the truest assets of my life.”

“What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!”

“Hope and faith underlie a promise,and love energizes men to realize it.”

“Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge…. Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.”

“Work without love is slavery.”

“It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death– ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.”

“I only have so much willpower, Helen,” he whispered. “And since you apparently sleep in the most ridiculously transparent tank top I’ve ever seen, I’m going to have to ask you to get under the covers before I do something stupid.”

“What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within the span of his little life by him who interests his heart in everything.”

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”

“Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking.”

“The worn soles of Daffy’s boots skidded on the icy stones. He’d been saving up for a new pair for Christmas, but then he’d come across an encyclopaedia in ten volumes, going cheap. Boots might last ten years, at best, but knowledge was eternal.”

“Joyful hope!”