“Even in a bad situation, there's always a positive side. Even if you can't see it yet.”

“Now, this is where I draw the line! It's bad enough everybody in town's going to be thinkin' I'm sleeping with a depressed, lice-ridden, hemorrhoidal foreigner who likes to be tied up and might be pregnant, although-since she's just about cornered the market on condoms-I don't know how that could have happened. But I will not-you listen to me, Emma!-I absolutely will not have anybody thinkin' a woman of mine needs a vaginal moisturizer, do you hear me?”

“Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?”

“If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.”

“And that’s when I realize that, at the end, we’d all wish for the same thing. Just a little more time.”

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”

“God does not give us more than we can handle," I am told but I wonder if God doesn't overestimate me just a little. Or perhaps, and this is likely, I underestimate God.”

“Roarke: You'd enjoy flying more if you'd learn the controls. Eve: I'd rather pretend I'm on the ground. Roarke: And how many vehicles have you wrecked, had blown up, or destroyed in the last, oh, two years? Eve: Think about that, then imagine it happening when I'm at the wheel at thirty thousand feet. Roarke: Good point. I'll do the flying.”