“Perhaps the only comfort which remainsIs the unheeded clanking of my chains,The which I make, and call it melody.”

“After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.”

“The future is called "perhaps", which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the only important thing is not to allow that to scare you.”

“Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung...”

“Who knew that better than I, who had presided over the death of my own body, seeing all I called human wither and die only to form an unbreakable chain which held me fast to this world yet made me forever its exile, a specter with a beating heart?”

“Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.”