No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.

But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.

The existence of other people is essentially awkward.

The secret is that there is no secret.

I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.

Now that children don't till your fields or take you in when you're incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it's amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all.

You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.