I know that even now, having watched enough television, you probably won't even refer to them as lepers so as to spare their feelings. You probably call them 'parts-dropping-off challenged' or something.

Hope is merely another face of desire.

Diogenes carried a bowl with him for years, but one day saw a man drinking from his cupped palm and declared, ‘I have been a fool, burdened all these years by the weight of a bowl when a perfectly good vessel lay at the end of my wrist.

The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door.

I was seven before I realized that you could eat breakfast with your pants on.

Theophilus Crowe's mobile phone played eight bars of "Tangled Up in Blue" in an irritating electronic voice that sounded like a choir of suffering houseflies, or Jiminy Cricket huffing helium, or, well, you know, Bob Dylan.

Compliment but do not covet.