“...to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster.”

“Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.”

“The adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality is appealing, don't you think?”

“But since a person's deepest fantasies were formed by their more or less screwed up childhoods, it made sense that anything based on them would end up in betrayal.”

“Getting rid of most of my personal library comported nicely with my longheld fantasy of traveling light, existing with minimal encumbrances, living simply. A fantasy it has always been, for the longr I have lived, the heavier has my equipage grown.”

“The colonel nodded. "Our childhood seems so far away now. All this" - he gestured out of the vehicle - "so much suffering. One of our Japanese poets, a court lady many years ago, wrote how sad this was. She wrote of how our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown.""Well, Colonel, it's hardly a foreign land to me. In many ways, it's where I've continued to live all my life. It's only now I've started to make my journey from it.”