Self pity is a disease which does not kill but corrodes.
He thought: How difficult it is to explain yourself to yourself. Sometimes there only is, and no knowing.
When you are in your teenage years you are consciously experiencing everything for the first time, so adolescent stories are all beginnings. There are never any endings.
Doing anything when you’re bored is very very boring. Anyway, doing nothing is the point of being bored. The pleasure of being bored ismooning about and doing nothing.
Belief means willing yourself to give all your attention to living with loving gladness in the world you think really exists.
You have to know your own truth and stick to it. And never despair. Never give up. There’s always hope.
Is it better to go with the flow or let the flow go?
There are times when you don’t know yourself. There are times when you don’t want to know yourself. There are times when you want to be what you have never allowed yourself to be before.
And trust dies from ifs and buts.
The books, the authors who matter the most are those who speak to me and speak for me all those things about life I most need to hear as the confession of myself.
The most memorable people in life will be the friends who loved you when you weren’t very lovable.
The plain unwelcome fact is that sometimes life stymies you.
I cannot live without reading.
And the price for being a homo-hater should be as high as anyone can pay.
Rooms are a fixed size, which can’t be altered without pulling down walls and building new ones. They should be unchanging in shape and proportions. But sometimes they do change depending on who’s in them.
I thought how lovely and how strange a river is...
You get to be wiser by storying the world and seeing it through other forms of consciousness than your own.
You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.
I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page – sometimes every word as well.
Readers are made by readers – it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it.