“A Japanese can live on a teaspoonful of rice a day. We were the best breed of worker they had ever hired in their lives.”

“Only a teaspoon of self-pity, girl. Every day give yourself a teaspoonful, but only a teaspoonful. Fill it up full, but only once! Don’t let yourself have more. You can’t live off it. But just a bit of it is like a tonic.”

“No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.”

“Alan had never been stabbed or shot or punctured or broken. Were scars the best evidence of living? If we have not survived something, and thus were certain that we'd lived, we could scar ourselves, couldn't we?”

“Its best to live as if it were the first and last day of my life.”

“People are so cheap. Everyone wants quality, no one wants to pay for it. Here's the suburban dream-- to hire great workers who are such meek morons that they don't have the guts to ask for a living wage.”