The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.

Youth is the hardest time in life. One seldom hears of an old person committing suicide.

It tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.

The sympathetic but sentimental man who sings the song of the blessed child also longs to return to nature, innocence, and the beginnings, but has completely forgotten that children are by no means...

Pulling away, I realized I had no place to go and nothing I wanted to do except satisfy my curiosity about a woman who was coming on like gangbusters and a big load of grief.

Do you know what Ed Gein said about women? When I see a pretty girl walking down the street I think two things. One part of me wants to take her out and talk to her and be real nice and sweet and...

A human being can bear a week of thirst, fourteen days of hunger, several years without a roof, but cannot endure loneliness.

He could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.

The exaltation of understanding; then understanding's bottomless regret.

Because we are human we have a long childhood, and one of the jobs of that childhood is to sculpt our brains. We have years--about twelve of them--to draw outlines of the shape we want our sculpted...

Who's that woman?

Our prisons are full of people who think they're Napoleon..or God.

Every place is the same place in the dark.

Rant goes, Really, truly with her whole entire heart, does Echo hate somebody? I go, doesn't Rant mean love? And Rant shrugs and says, Ain't it the same thing?

There are bodies buried everywhere you just have to know where to look.

If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion.

I used rebellion as a way to hide out. We use criticism as a fake participation.

You always kill the one you love.

He did not understand how such a short time in this house could have returned him to adolescence. He could package the place as hell's interpretation of the Fountain of Youth and make a fortune: just...

The impressions we pick up as children, when our minds are still open to influence and as soft as damp sponges, are likely to stay with us the longest.

You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.

You were worried about me? No, Hal said. I was worried Ranger would kill me if I lost you.

I knew there were no such things as death cooties. Unfortunately, that's an intellectual fact. And death cooties are an emotional reality.

Never try to understand the students. They hate it. They would much rather be tragically misunderstood, wallow in self-pity, stew in their own — That's enough, Phineas, said Dumbledore.

There is nothing so unsatisfactory as an ending with loose ends, this modern tendency to leave books incomplete.

The mind is much more interesting than the body.

It's so easy that when you begin you can't stop. You just go on and on doing it always.

Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on...

The Creationists, like all bigots, derive their fervour from rejection--the more they can reject, the more righteous they themselves feel.

Post-adolescent Expert Syndrome: The tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure...