"[T]he historian and the detective have much in common."

“Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you imagine”

“I'm instinctive. I'm still learning how to run the ball. What I've done may look good to everyone else, but I know I'm capable of more than I've shown.”

“I know what love is: Tracy and Hepburn, Bogart and Bacall, Romeo and Juliet, Jackie and John and Marilyn...”

“What doesn't kill you, usually succeeds in the second attempt.”

“A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.”

“Freedom lies outside the pattern of society; but to be free of that pattern you have to understand the whole content of it, which is to understand your own mind.”

“Secrets affect you more than you’d think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone’ll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn’t it the secret who’s actually using you?”

“He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.”