“I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.”

“People think they are all sort of things they aren't' he had sad. 'They think they are talented when they're not; they think they're powerful when they're actually just bullies; they think they're good when they're bad. People fools themselves all the time, and they don't know that they're fools”

“Only under extreme pressure can we change into that which it is in our most profound nature to become . . .That is what people get wrong about transformation. We're not all shallow proteans, forever shifting shape. We're not science fiction. It's like when coal becomes diamond. It doesn't afterwards retain the possibility of change. Squeeze it as hard as you like, it won't turn into a rubber ball, or a Quattro Stagione pizza, or a self-portrait by Rembrandt. It's done.”

“Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.”

“You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.”

“Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?”

“Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.”