The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?

You put your time where your priority is.

The end-of-summer winds make people restless.

Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it.

Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.

I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.

I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.

Who didn’t exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories?

The accounting of the sacrifice is, more than anything else, the attitude toward war memorials in our time.

Tomorrow! It is a period nowhere to be found in all the registers of time, unless, perchance, in the fool's calendar.

So I played alto for quite a while until I saved up the money for the baritone

I think any role you need to play not so much transforms but I like to think of it as understanding the psychology of another character.

Live your life, experience something, and then you're going to have a lot of things to say. But if you hang around in Hollywood, then you're going to say the same thing as everyone else - nothing.

At each level of gratitude our soul's capacity deepens, starting with contentment to meaningfulness, and finally, to pure joy.

I could sit there and eat pasta all day long and not worry about it when I was younger, and now I really have to focus on making sure I set a good example for my kids.

In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates.