If you have only one life, you cant altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?

This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.

Some crime against nature is about to be committed. I feel it in my veins. These men and boys are grocers and clerks, gardeners and fathers - fathers of small children. A country cannot bear to lose them.

That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.

I am driven by a greater force than I can resist. I believe that force has its own reason and its own morality even if they may never be clear to me while I am alive

The thunder of false modesty was deafening.

I don't think you ever understand your life - not till it's finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.