Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.

But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be recreated - not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

...the face has limited space. My mother used to say, if you fill your face with laughing, there will be no more room for crying.

There was no such thing as perfect privacy, life was a perpetual concert-hall recital with a captive audience.

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.

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

Birth and death - what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it's freakish, let's face it.