“The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.”

“We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.”

“Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, tol...”

“There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.”

“Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind.”

“You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, you...”

“I wish my whispers are heard and requited as a storm... Because, the storm is that keeps me alive!”

“To have no desire is such a load of bullshit--forgive me for being so blunt. To have no passion in one's life is a cop-out for cowards.”

“Being alive is having what I want, that is my joy, my happiness.”

“Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous embarkation and heroic conquest, or...”

“He didn't know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.”

“If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.”