For that's what a woman, a mother wants - to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it's safer for them to be interested in other people's happiness than to believe in their own.

Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn't understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her.

Drinking isn't necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can't drink without thinking you're killing yourself.

Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.

Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.

What stops you killing yourself when you're intoxicated out of your mind is the thought that once you're dead you won't be able to drink any more.

To love one child and to love all children, whether living or dead -somewhere these two loves come together. To love a no-good but humble punk and to love an honest man who believes himself to be an honest man -somewhere these, too, come together.