“Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn.”

“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.”

“For a long time I had wanted to take leave of Planet Tourism, to find one of those places that occasionally turn up in the middle pages of newspapers in far-flung cities, in which--we are told--a mad loner has been discovered who has lost all contact with the modern world. It seems inevitable that this desire will one day be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as Robinson Crusoe Syndrome.”

“As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.”

“I watched her backside as she went. I thought perhaps I wouldn't die if I could still find time to watch a well-crafted bottom”

“The army leaves me time to think, and saves me from the battle of life.”

“Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.”