“I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered wa...”

“That's what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call "personality", or maybe even "pain".”

“We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten.... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvar...”

“Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: "Just say no.”

“Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn't," I said."So everybody alive must have the Survivor's Syndrome. It's that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me prou...”

“The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesnt have to be a...”

“Don't you even think of holding back, or I'll...I'll tell Spade you let me get away from you," she improvised."And that I got mugged," she added for good measure.Cries of "Mon Dieu!" and "That's no...”

“He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so.”

“Those for whom things came easily usually made less of an effort, not more.”

“Soon she noted that teachers in subjects besides gym didn't report her if she cut. They were happy not to have her there: her intelligence made her a problem. It demanded attention and rushed their...”

“Soon she noted that teachers in subjects besides gym didn't report her if she cut. They were happy not to have her there: her intelligence made her a problem. It demanded attention and rushed their...”

“I existed in a world that never is , a prison of the mind.”

“It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier's mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was...”

“Sanity is over-rated. It lacks color.”