Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.

I used to act in college, but always comedy. Didn't do [William] Shakespeare - did Ben Jonson.

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.

It's very hard for students not to be in debt unless they've got big scholarships or rich parents. And it's called investing in your future, but like any investment it's risky because your future is an unknown quantity. However, if you don't invest in your future, you may be flipping hamburgers for the rest of your life. So it's a real dilemma.

The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.

Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.