"It is summer time! It is time to climb up on things and yell at other things that are too high to reach. It is time to mess up the calm quiet routines we built up all winter. With fire. It is time to make yourself proud and everyone else a little nervous."

"I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more."

"The ending was like biting into a delicious cake and finding the Holocaust inside."

"There’s always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it’s with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it’s one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again."

"

You are jealous and covet what others have, and your desires go unfulfilled; so you become murderers. (To hate is to murder as far as your hearts are concerned.) You burn with envy and anger and are not able to obtain the gratification, the contentment, and the happiness that you seek, so you fight and war. You do not have, because you do not ask.

Or you do ask and yet fail to receive, because you ask with wrong purpose and evil, selfish motives. Your intention is, when you get what you desire, to spend it in sensual pleasures.

"

"If you claim to be religious but don’t control your tongue, you are fooling yourself, and your religion is worthless."

"They whirled around. The man who stood facing them was Francisco d’Anconia.
His face looked tanned by a summer sun, and his eyes were the exact color of the sky on the kind of day when he had acquired his tan. His smile suggested a summer morning.
The way he wore his formal clothes made the rest of the crowd look as if they were masquerading in borrowed costumes."

"the best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
would ever want to
get away
from
them"

"there are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it’s too late
and there’s nothing worse
than
too late."

"He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others—the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad."