“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”

“One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?”

“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.”

“The Fur Person learned then and there that it is better to be a philosopher than to be a king and that, all things considered, wisdom was to be preferred to power.”