I don't like being rumbled, I like to be invisible.

I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.

From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on her ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.

It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.

Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.

Life can be lived at a remove. You trade in futures, and then you trade in derivatives of futures. Banks make more money trading derivatives than they do trading actual commodities.