I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

The kitten was six weeks old. It was enchanting, a delicate fairy-tale cat, whose Siamese genes showed in the shape of the face, ears, tail, and the subtle lines of its body. [...] She sat, a tiny thing, in the middle of a yellow carpet, surrounded by five worshipppers, not at all afraid of us. Then she stalked around that floor of the house, inspecting every inch of it, climbed up on to my bed, crept under the fold of a sheet, and was at home.