My existence from day to day has become a matter of averting my eyes, of cringing. Death is the only truth left. Death is what I cannot bear to think. At every moment when I am thinking of something else, I am not thinking death, am not thinking the truth.

he knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.

When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.

I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.

And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant