The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

... if you have nothing, you are free to choose among dreams and fantasies.

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all of your life, but in a new way.

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way ... I want to take words as ordinary as bread. Or life. Or death. Cliches. I want to have my nose rubbed in cliches.

Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.

(Life,) this escalator carrying her from dark into the dark.

Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.

... in due time she would fill like a container with substances and experiences... . she would become mature, that ideal condition envisaged as the justification of all previous experience, an apex of achievement, inevitable and peculiar to her. This apex is how we see things; it is a biological summit we see: growth, the achievement on the top of the curve of her existence, then a falling away towards death.