They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix.

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

Time itself made all things rare.

Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.

Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.

Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.

I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.

My mind is huge with little stories that I never told you.

Summer afternoon—summer afternoon

You can’t have it both ways. Either I’m Irish and can talk, or I’m a man and I can’t.

But most days, I wander around feeling invisible.Like I'm a speck of dustfloating in the airthat can only be seenwhen a shaft of light hits it.

A positive self-image has little relationship to our material circumstances.

The fly sat upon the axel-tree of the chariot-wheel and said, 'What a dust do I raise!'

The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.

A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.

We had problems like all families but we had a lot of love. I was extremely loved. We always felt we had each other.

This aircraft tops everything. All the others look old as compared to this one.

I like real people - salt-of-the-earth men.