It's an apathy so absolute that it's like a hole you might fall in.

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

Now, bitterly, with one sweep of the front door, the compassion was spent. To the degree that Lawrence's face was familiar, it was killingly so - as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known. She'd been handed her diploma. There were no more surprises - or only this last surprise, that there were no more surprises. To torture herself, Irina kept looking, and looking, at Lawrence's face, like turning the key in an ignition several times before resigning herself that the battery was dead.

However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse... We are meant to be hungry.

it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.

Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray.