"It’s too bad she’s the first girl I ever really knew, Thomas thought. I have no way of knowing whether all girls are this way or if she’s unique. I wonder if every guy heaves an instinctive sigh of relief when he’s kissed his girl goodnight, and the door is shut, and he can go relax by himself?"

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“How, he wondered forlornly, and when, did I become indistinguishable from the bad guys?”

“The wages of courage is death, lad, but it’s the wages of everything else, too.”

“Art, like a lot of things, is a lost art.”

“I’m not a joiner. Any time you work with people, they turn out to be inept clowns.”

“Sukie had always said that the Alice books were the Old and New Testaments for ghosts—which Pete had never understood; after all, Lewis Carroll hadn’t been dead yet when he’d written them.”

“It wasn’t fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn’t delivered like the mail.”

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"In alchemical treatises, the formula L'Oeuvre au Noir … designates what is said to be the most difficult phase of the alchemist's process, the separation and dissolution of substance. It is still not …"

— Marguerite Yourcenar

Literature1903–1987

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