A pessimist is a man who looks both ways when he crosses the street.

We're all free and equal to die like dogs

And the boys were all clean, their faces freshly and brutally shaved, their hair painstakingly gelled into exquisite apparent carelessness, with this electric feeling inside of them, which matched the feelings in the girls, that they were all ascending, moving into a future that could only improve them, and I wondered what it was like - the miracle, the stupidity of feeling that.

What’s going on?” Royce asked as throngs of people suddenly moved toward him from the field and the castle interior.
“I mentioned that you saw the thing and now they want to know what it looks like,” Hadrian explained. “What did you think? They were coming to lynch you?”
He shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a glass-half-empty kinda guy.”
“Half empty?” Hadrian chuckled. “Was there ever any drink in that glass?

Everyone rises to their level of incompetence.

It's better to have loved and lost than to have to do forty pounds of laundry a week.