The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.

Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.

Dreams? If only they had been! But I don't need dreams, Doctor, that's why I hardly have them—because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight!

The hard part is, of course, the proximity of death. The number has no meaning as long as you're fit and healthy. But you know that you only have so much time left and you don't know how much it is. It could be a very short time.

To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.