“My irritation with Niles was growing, though. I had always thought the quiet man was the most overrated form of human life".”

“Thinking is the most overrated human activity.”

“Living is not thinking. Thought is formed and guided by objective reality outside us. Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new.”

“From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so far, so it begins to look as though, unless I suddenly hit mid-season form in my eighties, humanity will remain a message short.”

“Even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth, we always behave as if there were something of higher value than human life.”

“But it wasn't just the distance. It was what had happened to me since these days, those endless, quiet days when I thought my life would always continue in that way. When my life consisted of small, certain pieces of a larger, but basically simple, puzzle.When I was certain that I always knew where each piece fit.”