“I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.”

“Sam Walton: I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.”

“Everyone else could get through to my mother: all they had to do was dial a number and wait for her to pick up. If only, I thought, it was that easy for me.”

“Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. If an ant fails, it's dead. But we're allowed to learn from our mistakes and from our failures. And that's how I learn, by falling flat on my face and picking myself up and starting all over again.”

“If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.”

“I had started trying—it for the first time, really—it to remember what had happened in that wood. I prodded tentatively around the edges of it, barely acknowledging even to myself what I was doing, like a kid picking at a scab but afraid to look.”