the true and the plausible are rarely the same.

Habit is far stronger than the lessons of experience.

In a city you thought of all life as human life. You had to live in the heart of the woods to realize that humanity was a slight ripple on the surface of a flood of life that seeped into every vacant crack, flowed into every biological vacuum the moment it occurred.

... law is a substitute for love.

Civilization is a fiction which becomes a fact only as long as everyone can believe in it. It is the cynic, rather than the rebel, who pulls down the whole flimsy structure periodically throughout history.

Privacy is like sleep - something you don't appreciate until you have to go without it.

Wouldn't it be kinder to say that a lie is a short work of fiction? 'A story' as my daughter says?