“His books distracted him for a while. They were like the aspirins you take when you've got a headache. They kill the pain for two hours and then it comes back.”

“The wonderful thing about the human mind is the way it copes when the worst happens. Beyond that worst happening you think there can be nothing, the unimaginable has taken place, and on the other side is death, destruction, the end. But the worst happens and you reel from it, you stagger, the shock is enormous, and then you begin to recover. You rally, you stand up and face it. You get used to it. For what had happen was not the worst, you realize that. the worst was yet to come, was perhaps always yet to come, never would actually come, because if it did, you would know it, that would be reality, and there would be nothing then but to kill yourself. Quickly.”

“Time, the best of all doctors, though it kills you in the end, had done more than therapy could.”

“By the age I was then I ought to know the truism that things always look different in the morning. As the night comes on and the deeper it gets, the more mad we are, the more prone to dreadful fears and fantasies. In the morning, not when we first wake up but gradually, things begin to look unlike what they looked like at eleven, at midnight.”

“Love is about allowing. Love is about letting people be free. You leave the cage door open and if you're really loved, the bird flies back to be with you. That's the only kind of love worth having.”

“Our children, when young, are part of ourselves. When they grow up they are just other people.”

“Games were being played, that was all, and games of which he was largely ignorant and wished to remain so.”