"Everything is changed - for you. But it is still the same, too. The loneliness you feel has come to you because you are no longer a child. But the whole world has always been full of that loneliness. The loneliness does not come from the War. The War did not make it. It was the loneliness that made the War."

"Indian Camp" returns to me whenever I hear a woman say that men will never understand what it means to bring a child into the world.

This book changed where I walk, how I cross the street, where I live, what I look for when I visit a new place, where I shop, what I eat, what I plant, the furniture I buy (or don't buy), pretty much everything about my day to day existence.

"This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste."

"I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul."

I read this book when I was 16. I haven't read it since. It made sense at the time.