We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

We live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving.

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.

What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.

I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.

Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.