“Life is fundamentally sad, I think. But it's what makes the happy moments really happy.”

“American business at this point is really about developing an idea, making it profitable, selling it while it's profitable and then getting out or diversifying. It's just about sucking everything up. My idea was: Enjoy baking, sell your bread, people like it, sell more. Keep the bakery going because you're making good food and people are happy.”

“What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.”

“The narrative compression of storytelling, especially in the movies, beguiles us with happy endings into forgetting that sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It's the great deadener. Those moments of joyful release from terror are not so easily had.”

“Never invest yourself in anything so deeply that its failure could cost you your happiness.”

“Here for a moment is a glimpse of my plan:All kids will be happy learning things.The wind will smell of wild flowers.Nobody will whack each other about with nasty things.All the room in the world.”

“But how to do feelings? All very well to write "She felt sad", or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things.”