In each man's heart there lies a hole. A dark abyss of need, the filling of which takes precedence over all else.

She says there are stories everywhere and that people who wait for the right one to come along before setting pen to paper end up with very empty pages.

Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.

She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.

You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.

But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.

Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.