Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.

No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.

People never remeber happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.

Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.

I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn't it?

I'm not trying to uncover the facts of my life but to discover the dramatic truth of the situations I was in.

Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.

Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn't have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control over.

You can only give things up once they start to let you down.

The whole Melrose series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power in telling the truth.

Nothing eases suffering like human touch.

A sudden peace and excitement washes over me at the sound of a voice I’ve never heard, yet I know so well.

If you were in a bad relationship and you meet someone new, you're going to leave with your luggage. The next person is going to have to endure things that someone else causes.

I don't think I ever played any sports recreationally for my own pleasure. I was bad at them from the start.

Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.

his eyes took in the barren slopes and the scattered boulders and the lonley gray road windingits way into the fading hills,and i could feel him thinking to himself this is no place to die

The fact that I lost my son permeates my being.

The tempests of youth are mingled with days of brilliant sunshine.

I've always liked my clothes, even before I could properly afford them. Clothes for me were never a cloak, a cover. They were how I chose to express myself.

Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?