“...you have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder, you have to shout it out; you have to shout for help... And...”

“It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.”

“I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn't learned that it can happen so gradually you don't lo...”

“Life, he knew, had meaning and was fully possessed only as it was remembered and reshaped.”

“Wait." Walter went to the basket, taking what was a gray sleeve, drawing it out fro the middle of the heap. "Oh," He said. He held the shapeless wool sweater to his chest. Joyce had knit for months...”

“She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page.”

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettie...”

“To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. ”

“The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.”

“The universe is seeming really huge right now. I need something to hold on to.”

“The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”

“Sometimes I try to erase myself. And then, if I've done a good job, I'm erased. I'm nothing. And then the world is free to flow into me like water into an empty bowl. And I see. I hear. But not wit...”