“Ariadne made an impression on you, and that's great. But life is not literature. Sooner or later, the spell wears off, the romantic feelings disappear, and you're left watching somebody's body disi...”

“The importance of humor is primarily to puncture fixed ideasto make us step back and realize that our situation, whatever it may be, is, in the grand scheme of things, always contingent and arbitra...”

“Theres no escaping it, hed been fond of telling us when he was well, the way you look defines who you are. You might argue for your soul, or your heart, but everyone else in the world will judge yo...”

“The stories we read in books, what's presented to us as being interesting - they have very little to do with real life as it's lived today. I'm not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires...”

“None of it made any difference. The hollow feeling refused to go away. The next days were very hard. I found myself in the grip of a crippling ennui. I was back at square one, but I couldnt bring m...”

“I saw myself as reviving a certain mode of life, a mode that had been almost lost: the contemplative life of the country gentleman, in harmony with his status and history. In Renaissance times they...”

“Mister Cameron - I have read the unexpurgated Ovid, the love poems of Sappho, the Decameron in the original, and a great many texts in Greek and Latin histories that were not though fit for proper ...”

“Animalsfattened for your for your arena suffered lessthan you in dying-yours the lawlessnessof something simple that has lost its law,my namesake, and the last Caligula.”

“So this is the boom, eh? I said. Not exactly Scott Fitzgerald, is it? Ill tell you what its like, he said glumly. Its like being in Caligulas Rome, and everyone around yous having an orgy, and your...”

“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to ...”

“You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physica...”

“If you go to Singapore or Amsterdam or Seoul or Buenos Aires or Islamabad or Johannesburg or Tampa or Istanbul or Kyoto, you'll find that the people differ wildly in the way they dress, in their ma...”

“By means of industry and perseverance you will rise higher and higher.”

“Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.”

“Perhaps that cruel girl was right? I should be a good girl, and my friend will be fine. I am too dramatic, always seeing the end in a flower blossom, the destruction in a raindrop. I must accept th...”