“If his relative success hadn't made him happy, it had, on average, made him less unhappy.”

“He had a bad habit of initially zeroing in on one or two things he liked about every new girl he found himself interested in, as if to justify his attraction.”

“People expect girls from good middle-class families to be smart -- but what they mean by smart for a girl is to have nice handwriting and a neat locker and to do her homework on time. They don't ex...”

“When you're single, your weekend days are wide-open vistas that extend in every direction; in a relationship, they're like the sky over Manhattan: punctured, hemmed in, compressed.”

“Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You're sizing people up to see if they're worth your time and attention, and they're doing the same to you. It's meritocracy applied ...”

“Creativity is the state of consciousness in which you enter into the treasury of your innermost being and bring the beauty into manifestation. (p.232)”

“Do you think I'm pretty?I think you're beautifulBeautiful?You are so beautiful, it hurts sometimes.”

“As if you were on fire from within.The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”

“If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.”

“I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen' 'You make it sound so simple.''It is simple,...”

“Does the work get easier once you know what you are doing?""Your lungs grow thick with stone dust and your eyes bleary from the sun and fragments thrown up by the chisel. You pour your lifeblood ou...”

“You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and inte...”

“Intelligence minus purpose equals stupidity.”

“But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence ...”