Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home.

For fun? Maybe evil is an art form.

She dreamed of leaving, but she had too little exposure to the world to imagine where to go.

The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.

And there the wicked witch stayed for a long long time.' Did she ever come out?' Not yet.

Such silly things, children -- and so embarrassing -- because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something. While animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.

Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.