Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up

No child should ever be too sad to play.

The amusements of life, he argued, should be accepted with the same philosophy as its ills. ("The Striding Place")

There were happy days, with watermelon, and sad days of whiskey.

Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.

It was that evening, when my mother abdicated her authority, that marked the beginning, along with the slow death of my grandmother, of the decline of my will and of my health. Everything had been decided at the moment when, unable to bear the idea of waiting until the next day to set my lips on my mother's face, I had made my resolution, jumped out of bed, and gone, in my nightshirt, to stay by the window through which the moonlight came, until I heard M. Swann go. My parents having gone with him, I heard the garden gate open, the bell ring, the gate close again...