Lately you are brooding too much about rights. Give up this dangerous habit.

There didn't seem to her any harm in it, and the make-believe was so comforting.

Where humans are concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure.

What folly made young people, even those in middle age, think they were immortal? How much better, their lives, if they could remember the end. Carrying your death with you every day would make it hard to waste time on unkindness and anger and bitterness, on anything petty. That was the secret: remembering your dying time, in order to keep the stupid and the ugly out of your living time.

I met my wife when we were both 19 or 20, at a music school where she was taking voice and piano lessons and I was doing classes in music theory and composition.

After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.

In the end, it’s all a question of balance.