Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms.

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.

And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.