“Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string t...”

“All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get wont be the truth: it will be...”

“I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.”

“... [They] took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again, after death has stopped us all in its tracks.”

“Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. ...”

“Everybody has a story. Its like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you cant...”

“If a man does not work passionately - even furiously - at being the best in the world at what he does, he fails his talent, his destiny, and his God.”

“I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prov...”

“Not everything you're good at is what you're called to do.”

“Time is no one's friend--time has no social niceties and holds the door for nobody nowhere. But I hold the door for time, with my one good paw.”

“He who says what he likes shall hear what he does not like.”

“Modesty: the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it.”