“I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it ourselves.”

“It was some time since I had gone to sleep in the same room with a girl. Of course, the room was large and reasonably well-lighted, and the girl had other things than me on her mind.”

“The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.”

“The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.”

“Try listening to yourself sometime, alone in a transient room in a strange town. The worst is when you draw a blank, and the ash-blonde ghosts of the past carry on long twittering long-distance cal...”

“I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people.”

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”

“There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.”

“In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.”