If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.

For a few minutes, maybe, life lingers in the tissues of some outlying regions of the body. Then, one by one, the lights go out and there is total blackness. And ifsome part of the non—entity we called George has indeed been absent at this moment of terminal shock, away out there on the deep water, then it will return to find itself homeless.

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination.

No one ever hates without a cause.

The past is just something that's over.

A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp. And the world seems so fresh as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.

The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.