And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.

Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.

For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.

No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.

The cost of oblivius daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realigment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual. It was difficult to come back.

I've always thought cruelty is a failure of imagination.

Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.