It’s just life. You can’t beat life.

His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.

I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.

He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.