No child should ever be too sad to play.

Sometimes I wonder if my heart is like a black hole--it's so dense that there's no room for light, but that doesn't mean it can't still suck me in.

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

Now you see. We are all fugitives. We have always been fugitives from the void. Whatever comfort, whatever power we gain from outside of ourselves diminishes us -- because comfort and power, unless they are won from the void inside of us, are illusions that make us forget the emptyness that carries us. When we forget that, we believe we deserve comfort and power and so are capable of any evil. We deserve nothing but what we make of ourselves. We deserve nothing else. And when we understand that, then nothing is enough.

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.