You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us... But if you are interested in life it never lets you down. I am interested in the blueness of the cheese.

Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever.

She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present—she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation.

She dabbed at her eyes. 'You'd be bored, Henry. An unfinished bottle of champagne found in an old cupboard with all the sparkle gone …' The jaded phrase was worthy of a Haymarket author.

They are descriptions of what real life looks like, not prescriptions for how to get life.

All I can do is today and tomorrow and have some idea of what we're doing next week. That's all I can worry about.

It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter.

We should all start to live before we get too old.

There is an immeasurable distance between late and too late.

I am an American citizen and it is my home now. I like the U.S.A., which is not a place too many people have liked since Bush. The U.S. has a young population, and everything can change within a year.

The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.

Life, if well lived, is long enough.