If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

He was silent for thirty seconds, maybe a minute. I uncrossed my legs under the table and wondered if this was the right moment to leave. It was as if my whole life revolved around trying to judge the right point in a conversation to say goodbye.

That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that's how we've got to live.

It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.

I'm scared," she said. "These days I feel like a snail without a shell." "I'm scared too," I said. "I feel like a frog without any webs." She looked up and smiled. Wordlessly we walked over to a shaded part of the building and held each other and kissed, a shell-less snail and a webless frog.

If you never noticed, it never happened.