She was beginning to realize that no amount of genius ever compensates for, nor excuses, a paucity of kindness, integrity, and unconflicted devotion. - Maria Popova

But interpretation invariably reveals more about the interpreter than about the interpreted. The gap between intention and interpretation is always rife with wrongs, especially when writer and reader occupy vastly different strata of emotional maturity and intellectual sophistication.

Ambition is disfigured into arrogance when it becomes unmoored from self-awareness, from a realistic assessment of one's competences.

He is not handsome, but looks as the author of his books should look: a little strange and odd, as if not of this earth.