“He knew my African tendency to approach things by running in circles around them.”

“And Lawrence was afraid of the main thing. He had a tendency to talk feverishly all around the main thing, as if bundling it with twine. Presumably if he talked in circles around the main thing for long enough it would lie there, vanquished, panting on its side, like a roped steer.”

“If there was a reason why he preferred the liberal tendency to the conservative one (also held to by many of his circle), it was not because he found the liberal tendency more sensible, but it more closely suited his manner of life.”

“We approach the house and I wave at Jimmy. "And if he thinks he's eating with us, he's got another thing coming," my dad says.Jimmy approaches us and takes the shopping bags from me, looking inside them."Lamb roast. Am I invited?”

“He well knew his mind's natural tendency to be endlessly on a thousand subjects at once, to flit from this to that and to the next thing to no particular purpose--indeed, he called it his "butterfly mind.”

“Becoming serious was not the same thing as approaching truth, I sensed, however vaguely. But death was a fact, a serious fact, no matter how you looked at it. Stuck inside this suffocating contradiction, I went on endlessly spinning in circles. Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.”