“Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.”

“Nobody can judge an internal injury," he had said, "by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole.”

“You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.”

“I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.”

“But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.”

“Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.”

“The black ice of that dark fortress received the sunlight like a mortal wound.”