It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.

No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.

I felt like a rich vagabond who had passed through the world paving my way with gold fairy dust, then realizing too late that the path disintegrated as soon as I passed over it.

Chaos is the penance for leisure.

She would be quiet at first. Then she would say a word about something small, something she had noticed, and then another word, and another, each one flung out like a little piece of sand, one from this direction, another form behind, more and more, until his looks, his character, his soul would have eroded away . . . I was afraid that some unseen speck of truth would fly into my eye, blur what I was seeing and transform him from the divine man I thought he was into someone quite mundane, mortally wounded with tiresome habits and irritating imperfections.

We are living in a world where everything is false. The society is like bright paint applied on top of rotten wood.

You see what power is holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them.