There were more ways to live than the ones given by one’s superiors.
Little critters fried like fritters come out crunchy and divine.
I’m not a writer because I want to make money. I’m a writer because I’m a very slow thinker, but I do care about thinking, and the only way I know how to think with any kind of finesse is by telling stories.
No one survives in times of war unless they make war their home. How did I get so old and wise, but for welcoming war into my house and making friends with him? Better to befriend the enemy and hang on. Something worse might come along, which might be amusing or might not.
Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through.
To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.
There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one’s.
The sweet accident of coincidence is the best foundation on which to build.
And a puzzle is for the piecing together, especially for the young, who still believe it can be done.
I may not be sure if monsters exist, but I’d rather live my life in doubt than be persuaded by a real experience of one.
The devil is a very big angel, but a very little man.
Sorrow has a name, and its name is loneliness. Sorrow has a shape, and its shape is absence. Sorrow is a sickness like any other.
I take responsibility only for the future, not the past. The past can’t hurt you the way the future can.
We only have babies when we’re young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it – we’re slow learners, we women – we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production.
Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience.
The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.
Before catechisms can instill a proper humility, small children know the truth that their own existence has caused the world to bloom into being.
A man is called a traitor, or liberator. A rich man is a theif or philanthropist. Is one a crusader or ruthless invader? It’s all in which label is able to persist.
It’s the endlessly thinking about yourself that causes such heart shame.
I never write a book unless I can’t help it. Something has to bother me, like a mosquito, until I have to do something to relieve the itch.