I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.

She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.