some people are democrats by choice, and some by necessity.

We all lead more pedestrian lives than we think we do. The boiling of an egg is sometimes more important than the boiling of a love affair in the end.

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

My father was often angry when I was most like him.

Lonely. I always thought loneliness meant alone, without people. It means something else.

Childhood is less clear to me than to many people: when it ended I turned my face away from it for no reason that I know about, certainly without the usual reason of unhappy memories. For many years that worried me, but then I discovered that the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted. Some people supply too many past victories or pleasures with which to comfort themselves, and other people cling to pains, real and imagined, to excuse what they have become.

The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.