Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

very young people are true but not resounding instruments.

With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

Education is not so important as people think.

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon