If you want a man to trust you, ask him for a favor. Most people get this part wrong. They try to win people over by offering something to them, but humans instinctively recoil from those who help them. They like the people that they help far better, even if the favor granted is as small as a cigarette.

There’s no such thing as fate. It’s just the word men give to decisions which have worked out badly.

Fate drives cruel bargains. We must always release one thing before we can grasp something else.

If Anthony Weaver knew anything, it was this: That life and love and country and duty…that all of these things faded in time. They came and went with the impartial cruelty of the Indian sun. But sin and sin alone is eternal.

Siri, what is the meaning of life? She answers: To think about questions like this. Huh. Good one.

This is what progress does, you know. Each step into the future makes us ever so much grander and more demanding and thus ever so slightly less human.

I hope I leave this world gracefully, like a pilgrim slips from the back of his donkey at the end of a long ride, like a traveler disembarks from an airplane that has carried him across a great ocean.

Falling in love slowly is like awakening one morning to find that the sun has risen in the west.