“...but grief, he'd discovered, was not an experience you went through once and then 'moved on' (as the idiotic popular phrase would have it). The truth was that it came over you in successive waves - waves separated by periods of numbness, periods of forgetfulness, periods of ordinary living.”

“In the time of writing you have to forget the present, if you can do that. Try to live in the period you are writing.”

“Probably some period thing. I go completely mental too. Period fever. It's the worst."This effectively killed all conversation for a while...."Fixed that," she said."You told him I had period fever," I replied. "There's no such thing as period fever.""No such thing as ghosts either.""No, there is really no such thing as period fever. There's a difference between being a guy and being an idiot.”

“Without self-discipline, success is impossible, period.”

“Which one is the truth, sir?Which period do you mean, son?”

“Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poetsthemselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.”