At fourteen you don't need sickness or death for tragedy.

Knowledge of what you love somehow comes to you; you don’t have to read nor analyze nor study. If you love a thing enough, knowledge of it seeps into you, with particulars more real than any chart can furnish.

I am always jumping into the sausage grinder and deciding, even before I’m half ground, that I don’t want to be a sausage after all.

The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate.

Only a fool would refuse to enter a fool's paradise when that's the only paradise he'll ever have a chance to enter.

It is not easy to be solitary unless you are also born ruthless. Every solitary repudiates someone.

Each death and departure comes to us as a surprise, a sorrow never anticipated. Life is a long series of farewells; only the circumstances should surprise us.