...such people are themselves too dull to understand how far a noble nature, an honorable ancestry and a virtuous upbringing can fortify men against grief, and that although fate may defeat the efforts of virtue to avert misfortune, it cannot deprive us of the power to endure it with equanimity.

Plutarch on Cornelia, the mother of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus

If you're born to it, if you're like the salamander, it must be like heaven, as if heaven were on Earth. The hell must be that no one will leave you alone here in heaven. That people hunt you and people kill you and people just cannot be still in their own bodies and listen and watch and hear but must somehow escape the beat of their own hearts by ever being in motion, even when they come to rest.

Conversation enriches the understanding,

But solitude is the school of the genius.

- Gibbon, quoted by Philip Jose Farmer 

His love of the theater was that of an amateur. He picked up gossip, mementos, handbills. He loved technique, to walk backstage and see Ophelia with her mad face half rubbed off. This was humanity in theater, the scar - the old actor famous for playing whimsical judges,who rode the Queen streetcar east of the city and ate his dinner alone before joining his sleeping wife. Patrick liked that. He wanted to be fooled by the person he felt could not fool him, who stopped three yards past the side curtain and became somebody else.

- You’ve got a lot more time with her.
- No. I feel she’s loned to me. We’re veiled in flesh. That’s all.

“You don’t look so well yourself,” said Masters. 
“Growing-pains, Masters. One is always growing up, at other peoples expense. . . .”

At the end of most lives, he reminded himself, death did not arrive as a crime, but as a great mystery, which everyone had to solve alone.