Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.

The best thing about being God would be making the heads.

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

Most real relationships are involuntary.