Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself.

To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.

I lay there, stretched out, looking at the one star visible through the tiny window of the room. Only connect. How can you do that when the connections are broken?

The ancients believed in fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.

I think of love as a force of nature-as strog as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming,as drought-making as it is life-giving.

When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.