Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks. Life itself had become a secret affair.

Sometimes even the imagination lets one down.

Occasionally we all do wrong things from right motives. Only time can prove us right or wrong. The past is the past. Nothing can change it now, and who is to say that it was all wrong, anyway?

I prefer to believe the opposite - that there is always an indestructible beauty at the heart of darkness.

But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him.

There had to be a reason why they were not going to marry. They had both been so adamant about it. What the devil was the reason?

I wish," he said, "I had known at eighteen what I know now - that there are some things on which one does not compromise.