What was the good at having an ideal if everyone is trying to beat everyone else at admitting how impossible it is to achieve it.

Don’t be a chicken, be a cat!” said Cecil. “Be adventurous”.

It was as though she practiced some shameful art: black magic, voodoo, or poetry.

And it seemed to me that longing was everything, longing is all we are.

We long for a life we never had but of which we seem to have a clear memory; a life in wich there is no longing.

How, given the canine teeth and close-set eyes that declare the human animal to be a predator, had we come up with the notion that oat bran is more natural to eat than chicken?

I see I have this patience to wait it out, and the truth is no matter how dark I feel I would never take my own life, because when the darkness is over, then what a blessing is the feeblest ray of light!

She felt she had been created by the demands of others, by their insatiable appetite for something beyond ordinary life. They craved a world without death and they had spotted her, in their hunger, like wolves alert to any poor sheep that might stray from the fold and stand gazing ignorantly up at the stars.

Everyone else felt the need to assure me that Mother's death was part of God's plan. Exactly, I wanted to shout after reading this sentiment half a dozen times--- his plan is to kill us all, and if an innocent child dies in agony and a wicked man breathes his last at an advanced age in his sleep, who are we to call it injustice?

But you said you no longer care for the world's opinion," I said to him, "nor will I.