For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.

You do too much. Go and do nothing for a while. Nothing.

Was it always my nature to take a bad time and block out the good times, until any success became an accident and failure seemed the only truth?

A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple, unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant.

I'm good at embroidery. It's what I always wanted to do.... Yep, instead of whoring, I just wanted to do fancy embroidery.

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.

Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.