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"What do you live for?" I ask her suddenly. "Is it for me?Is it for family and love? Or is it for some dream?"

"It's not just some dream, Darrow. I live for the dream that my children will be born free. That they will be what they like.That they will own land their father gave them."

"I live for you," I say sadly.

She kisses my cheek. "Then you must live for more."

There comes a point in love, a unique moment which later on the soul seeks in vain to surpass

"Death isn't empty like you say it is. Emptiness is life without freedom, Darrow. Emptiness is living chained by fear, fear of loss, fear of death.I say we break those chains.Break the chains of fear and you break the chains that bind us to the Golds, to the Society. Could you imagine it?"

You cannot be sincere and at the same time seem so.

Humans are always negotiating. That's what conversation is. Someone has something, knows something. Someone wants something.

The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free, that is the task.

People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don’t find themselves at all.

I create each hour’s newness by forgetting yesterday completely. Having been happy is never enough for me. I don’t believe in dead things. What’s the difference between no longer being and never having been?

I soon realized that what are supposedly the worst things (lying, to mention only one) are hard to do only when you have never done them; but that each of them becomes, and so quickly! easy, pleasant, sweet in repetition, and soon a second nature.

I cannot apply to myself the distinctions and the reservations they insist on making—I exist only as a whole man. I lay claim to nothing but my own nature, and the pleasure I take in an action is my clue to its propriety

No matter how complete the despair, no matter how bitter the cynicism, a possibility beckons of a world more beautiful and a life more magnificent than what we know today. Though we may rationalize it, it is not rational. We become aware of it in moments, gaps in the rush and press of modern life. These moments come to us alone in nature, or with a baby, making love, playing with children, caring for a dying person, making music for the sake of music or beauty for the sake of beauty. At such times, a simple and easy joy shows us the futility of the vast, life-consuming program of management and control.

Maybe I sound like some Victorian who felt that forty years ought to be enough for any man, but one of the marks of a live well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind.