When Perry tells Gidget that he has John Keats's 'Negative Capability', he paraphrases the English poet by saying, "a man of achievement must have one quality: negative capability." The actual quotation comes from a letter the poet wrote to his brothers in 1817: a man of achievement possesses Negative Capability when that "man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."