Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.

He dares not concern himself with the future for fear of disturbing the present.

In a long and healthy life, which is what most of us have, there is plenty of time.

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.

Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.

nothing she did or said was quite what she meant but still her life could be called a monument shaped in a slant of available light and set to the movement of possible music

The recounting of a life is a cheat...even our own stories are obscenely distorted.