“These things are never easy, and you take them to your grave.”

“We can't change things, you and I. We sit up here all day, under a bad sun, but we can't stop the weather turning. We make our piles of earth and they become graves around us. Nothing's as important as it seems.”

“I will always be there in the wings saying, 'You need to be good to people. You need to take your work seriously. You need to have integrity. You need to work with what you've got.”

“Call me a schoolmarm, but few things make me angrier than people not taking good care of library materials.”

“Could have been, mind you. And that's one big mother of a conditional. Because who's to say she wanted me in the same way? After all, she left me, didn't she? Maybe I didn't try too hard to get her to stay but what words are there for begging? Please? Don't go, honey? They're crippled halfwits, those sentences, and besides, who uses a lot of words in a friendship anyway? You run out of things to say pretty early on, that's my experience. Sure, you start off thick enough, so many words you could gag on them. The facts, and the sentences - and the sticky tears. Out it comes, out it all comes, the fat story of your life but before you know it you've talked your guts out and there's nothing left to say. You go to her, to confide, and choke up air.”

“Just the way it never rains when you have an umbrella, you'll never run into people if you look fantastic. But go outside in pajamas, and you'll run into every ex you have.”

“You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never be too well read or too curious about the world.”