We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.

We should take mothers in high seas and drown them there, they are as poisonous as lead in the air.

You know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up?" Fat said. "There are worse diseases than cancer." "Did he show you slides?" We both laughed. When you are nearly crazy with grief, you laugh at what you can.

He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.

It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.

How much of what we call 'reality' is actually out there or rather within our own head?

There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. That one of the biggest transformations we have seen in human life in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. That we must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.