Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.
History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
I was no good at being a child.
Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.