But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.

In theory I can do almost anything; certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit's cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me.

It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends have been evasive about it, at the time.

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Each form has its pluses and its minuses.