“What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears t...”

“The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some ...”

“That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.”

“But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.”

“It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.”

“Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and gravel to it.”

“She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.”

“If you don't learn to laugh at life it'll surely kill you, that I know.”

“Through all of living have much joy and laughter, life is to be enjoyed, not just endured.”

“We look before and after,And pine for what is not;Our sincerest laughterWith some pain is fraught;Our sweetest songs are those that tell Of saddest thought.”

“I know why we laugh. We laugh because it hurts, and it's the only thing to make it stop hurting.”

“MARCUS ANDRONICUS: Now is a time to storm; why art thou still?TITUS ANDRONICUS: Ha, ha, ha!MARCUS ANDRONICUS: Why dost thou laugh? it fits not with this hour.TITUS ANDRONICUS: Why, I have not anoth...”

“She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.”

“For we think back through our mothers if we are women.”

“He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.”