I don't think I've ever drunk champagne before breakfast before. With breakfast on several occasions, but never before before.

all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.

I couldn't understand a sense of unease that multiplied until I could hear my heart beating.

Great fury, like great whisky, requires long fermentation.

There's lots of things you don't know. All kinds of strange things . . . mostly they happened before we were born: that makes them seem to me so much more real.

But mostly they were lies I told; it wasn't my fault, I couldn't remember, because it was as though I'd been to one of those supernatural castles visited by characters in legends: once away, you do not remember, all that is left is the ghostly echo of haunting wonder.

So the days, the last days, blow about in a memory, hazy autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I've lived