“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

“Her best friend was gone and nobody understood that no amount of makeup, fresh air or shopping was going to fill the hole in her heart.”

“A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”

“We’re none of us more than wisps of desire and imagining! What man is not, at the center of his mind, a ghostly wish-to-be haunting the jerry-built habitation of his imperfect acts? Haunting the maze of what-has-been?”

“Do the gods light this fire in our hearts
or does each man's mad desire become his god?”
Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt, Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?

“The riches of the soul are stored up in its memory. this is the test of character, not whether a man follows the daily fashion, but whether the past is alive in his present.”

“No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.”

“Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.”

“Man is liberated from his illusions to make room for a fresh set.”

“The two of them looked so comfortable together it made Nico glad. But it also it caused an ache in his heart – a ghostly pain, like an old war wound throbbing in bad weather.”