My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year.

Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?

Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.

Letters are just pieces of paper," I said. "Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.

Strong and independent? I’m neither. I’m just being pushed along by reality, whether I like it or not.

I spent thirty-three years in another man's shadow. I went everywhere he went, I helped him with everything he did. I was in a sense a part of him. When you live like that for a long time, you gradually lose track of what it is you yourself really want out of life

Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion