Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am drifting off, all that, I tell myself that lying down to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity is not something to be concerned about. What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead they don't read books. This I find unbearable.

What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.

My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.

A gentleman doesn't have one set of manners for the house of a poor man and another for the house of someone with an income incomparable to his own.

Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.

Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).

The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.