Ghosts of Harvard

You’ll find that most people here are more adept at appearing intelligent than actually being so. They’re mostly dolts.

snapshots to remember in our mental scrapbooks and throw away the bad? Perhaps all photo albums should bear the subtitle “The Past—The Way You Want to Remember It.

It takes only an error to father a sin.

Just because you can't explain something doesn't make it untrue.

Adventure is only possible if you don't spoil the ending.

Tragedy taints a person, and no one wants to touch that sadness, just in case it spreads.

I haven't thought past my father. He died a few days shy of his thirtieth birthday. When I picture my future, I can imagine my Naval career, starting a family, but I can't picture myself as a geezer, or really any older than he got to be. It's like he's the horizon line in my head, I'm always moving toward it, but I can't imagine getting to the other side.

They say fate is written in the stars, but the irony is that stars don't project the future, they reflect the past. If you think about it, every time you look at a star, you're looking back in time. The North Star is four hundred thirty light-years away, so when you see it shining, the light hitting your eyes is already four hundred thirty years old.

Cady had learned that the family of a suicide victim doesn’t get straight sympathy.

but Harvard was more than a school. It was validation. It was history. It was expectation.

the rattle of a bathtub chain beneath a thunderous faucet,

When you love someone, time isn’t such a big obstacle.

Our feelings about the result of any action color our perception of past decision making.

It is far easier and more pleasant to imagine happy endings, however farfetched, in all their vivid, rainbow colors than it is to face each day's reality and let time and fortune do their worst.

You can see more in total darkness than you ever could in light.

All of our stories end, one way or another. The stars are a reflection of the past, what you leave behind.

Stars don't project the future, they reflect the past.

The universe will always have its secrets.

The life is false. It's just death reanimated. Life may spring from death, but it's tainted. There's no escape from the remains of the dead.

Anguish is distinguished from fear in that fear is fear of beings in the world whereas anguish is anguish before myself. Vertigo is anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over the precipice, but of throwing myself over.

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

But home didn’t mean a perfect place with only good memories, it meant a place where you grew up.

Now she understood that we must love people whom we cannot control, in fact, we are lucky to love and be loved by people we cannot control. If we could control the person, love wouldn’t be a gift. This was the uncertainty of life, and of death. It was what made life beautiful and terrifying at once. It was the state of grace.

She had only been another white person who didn’t get it—and with two hundred fifty years to know better.

My curse is that my child is not mine to keep. Eli was of my own body,but he does not belong to me. I don’t own my body neither. By natural law I do, but by the white man’s laws of paper and ink, I own nothing. You can steal something with gunpowder. You can hold something down by chains. But you own it with paper.