Life is full of alternatives but no choice.

If I have not lost my mind I can sometimes hear it preparing to defect

To understand the stars would spoil their appearance.

She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep.

If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.

Because he had nothing to hide, he did perhaps appear to have forfeited a little of his strength. But that is the irony of honesty.

She had begun to read in the beginning as a protection from the frightening and unpleasant things. She continued because, apart from the story, literature brought with it a kind of gentility for which she craved.