“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.”

“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.”

“Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life.”

“Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world "postmodernist.”

“What do you think about America?""Everyone always smiles so big! Wellmost people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.”

“Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.”

“Never question another man's motive. His wisdom, yes, but not his motives.”

“All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.”

“All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.”

“Theres no way you can kill someone and get to the other side of the experience unchanged.”

“Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled enemy?”

“He had also learned that there is no use murdering people; there are always so many left, and if you tried to murder them all you would never get anything else done.”