“Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.”

“But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded on their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.”

“All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.”

“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”

“It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor's wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook.”

“I’m losing the appetite for strangers. Once I would have focused on the excitement, the hazard; now it’s the mess, the bother. Getting your clothes off gracefully, always such an impossibility; thinking up what to say afterwards, without setting the echoes going in your head. Worse, the encounter with another set of particularities: the toenails, the ear-holes, the nosehairs. Perhaps at this age we return to the prudishness we had as children.”

“Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means.Toast is me.I am toast.”