…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. " "What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability?

If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.

That would be the death of anyone - to recognize false hopes with a certainty. One mustn't know that. If it is offered, refuse!

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the troubles of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another.

I have a different purpose in writing each novel. Some of them seem more similar than others, but the purposes are always different.

It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.

We tire differently if we love or love not.