You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more.

There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.

You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.

There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them.

It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself

Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.

What good were real feelings anyway?

That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.

he was home on his own and listening to the sort of music he needed to listen to when he felt like this, music that seemed to find the sore spot in him and press up hard against it...

Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn't hear a squeak out of it.

The appeal was so often the same: Make me comfortable so I can go on doing whatever I want to do. They wanted sin without consequences.

The aristocracy in the future is not one of wealth or university education, but the aristocracy of the men who have done something for themselves and their fellow men.

Nothing is distinct and separate.

The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.

The best ideas and the most useful and ground-breaking are often, though not always, in one sense, very simple ideas.

The problem of empathy is pretty universal, and pretty much breaks down across America. People can't feel beyond their drawn borders. And skin color and culture have a lot to do with that.

Our victory is sure to come, and I can endure anything but recreancy to principle.

You surrender to love; you do not accomplish love by willpower.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.